Little $9 USD pc, plus cheap case... promising as calculator?

[Dave Britten]

I've got one of these. I jumped on board the first couple of days they were on Kickstarter back around spring 2015, so I got my kit early this summer. It's a cool little machine; I like the CHIP a lot more than the Pi Zero (I still haven't come up with anything interesting to do with my Zero). It's got built-in wireless (including Bluetooth), pre-installed headers, a full-size USB port, and a power management chip that actually handles a battery natively, including charging. The PocketCHIP chassis is quite nice, and uses no screws, so it's ripe for hacking. Everything fits together very well, and you can access the USB port, micro USB charging port, and headphone jack on top of the CHIP while it's inserted.

I believe the on-board storage is an 8 GB MLC NAND flash, but the bootloader that's being used doesn't support MLC, so only 4 GB is usable currently. Something like that, anyway. There's no on-board SD card slot, but you can connect flash drives to the full-size USB port.

With all that said, the software still needs a bit of work. Last I checked, there were two separate OS images: one for the PocketCHIP, and one for running the board standalone with the HDMI or VGA adapters. I hear they're working to unify everything. Also, there aren't any proper GPU drivers yet, so no hardware acceleration.