A10 SoC
Couldn't find a shred of info on it on the web otherwise, but from the official site seems to be running an Allwinner A10, and from one Newegg review, its preloaded with the Play Store...thoughts? In general, what does the A10/Mali-400/1GB RAM combination look performance-wise?
Well, I don't have one of the netbooks. I do, however, have a Mele 2000 Android based set-top box, which is also based on the Allwinner A10 SoC. In general what I have found about this SoC is that it has kind of a slow CPU by today's standards (single core A8), but it has a very capable GPU, perhaps surprsisingly so. This makes it so the unit is kind of sluggish at general responsiveness, but plays video very well indeed.
For example, Netflix is rather slow to load to the point where it responds to user input. Once it is fully loaded, it works perfectly and plays video very well. YouTube is reasonably responsive and plays video very well even at 1080p (if your Internet will load it fast enough; I tend to stick to 720p for live streams because of my Internet speed). DailyMotion and Vimeo are similar to YouTube, except that their apps tend to be buggier. If you download a Neon enabled VLC, it works very well. General browsing is kind of sluggish compared to more powerful Android devices. Other video streaming apps work well. I find this quite capable as a set-top box. I'm not sure if the SoC is quite as appropriate for a smartbook.
Another possible consideration is that most A10 based devices are quite capable of booting to an alternate system from the SD Card slot. If this is true of this smartbook, that could make it more interesting. You can run Linux on other A10 devices. The only caveat is that video acceleration (the strength of the SoC) is not really working on Linux yet. However, an open source accelerated driver for the Mali series of video chipsets is in development and showing some serious promise. So in the future, this could be a fairly capable Linux device, while still holding it's original value as an Android device. I would try to confirm it's capability to boot from the SD Card (like other A10 devices) before I counted on this capability though.
