Ars Technica Reviews ASUS Chromebit
ASUS launched the Chromebit a few days ago, but this is the first review I’ve seen of the device. No surprises as far as I can tell from the review. Have a look if this sort of portable computing piques your interest. If you do buy one, get the orange – everything looks better in orange :).
Asus’ new Chromebit isn’t the first computer-on-an-HDMI-stick, nor is it the fastest or the most flexible. You’re going to be able to do more with a Windows PC, just as a cheap Windows laptop can do more stuff than a Chromebook despite having similar hardware to do it with.
But Chrome OS feels like it might actually be a better match for the sort of hardware that will fit inside an HDMI dongle (at least until that beefier Core M Compute Stick from Intel comes out, assuming it doesn’t have major hardware problems). For £90, Asus will sell you a full Chrome OS device running on ARM hardware, and while neither of those two things are going to blow anyone away, they’re actually pretty well paired if you’re looking for something that walks the line between PC and appliance.