Odroid-S (Android Powered Handheld, Possible Emulation Monster !!!)

Odroid-S Device Picture (Taken from http://www.hardkernel.com/productsko.php)

Odroid-S is a successor to Odroid, which was produced by Korean opensource hardware company, Hardkernel Co. Ltd. (http://www.hardkernel.com/) located in Republic of Korea.

This family of device design is now constructing a very unique area of opensource hardware development platform, which is accelerated by adopting gaming handheld form-factor (Arrow keys + Minimum 4 Action Buttons + L, R Shoulder Buttons).

This device has undergone great improvement over its predecessor by incoorporating more powerful CPU (Samsung S5PC110, Same CPU used in Galaxy-S) and of course GPU (PowerVR SGX 540, stronger than SGX 535 which is installed in Apple's iPhone 3GS).

Below table shows the direct comparison of specifications between Odroid-S and Odroid.(Data are taken from product description page of Hardkernel's website, and S5PC100, and S5PC110 User's Manual)

	Oroid-S	Oroid
Processor	Samsung S5PC110 Cortex-A8 1GHz with 512KB L2 Cashe	Samsung S5PC100 Cortex-A8 833MHz
3D Accelerator	SGX540 (up to 20M triangles/s and 1000M pixels/s) Universal Scalable Shader Engine OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenVG 1.0	Unknown (5M triangles/s and 200M pixels/s) Programmable Shader Model 3.0 OpenGL ES 2.0, D3D Mobile
Memory	512MB Mobile DDR 400Mbps	512MB Mobile DDR 333Mbps
Internal Storage	OneNAND 512MB	None
External Storage	Micro-SD, Standard SDHC Slot	Micro-SD, Standard SDHC Slot
Display	3.5-inch 480x320 with capacitive touch screen (No multi-touch)	3.5-inch 480x320 with capacitive touch screen (No multi-touch)
Video Playback	1080p (H.264+AAC based MP4)	720p (H.264+AAC based MP4)
Video Output	mini-HDMI connector with SPDIF audio	mini-HDMI connector with SPDIF audio
Audio Interface	Speaker, Microphone, Standard 3.5mm headphone jack	Speaker, Microphone, Standard 3.5mm headphone jack
I/O	USB 2.0 HS, TTA20, USB 2.0 Host by TTA20 to USB board	USB 2.0 HS, TTA20
Wireless Device	802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR	802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
Operating System	Android Eclair 2.1	Android Eclair 2.1
Dimensions	150 x 76 x 16 mm	150 x 76 x 16 mm
Weight	160g (with 1300 mAH Li-Ion battery)	160g (with 1300 mAH Li-Ion battery)
Other Features	3-axis accelerometer, Geo magnetic field sensor	3-axis accelerometer

Harnessing the CPU/GPU power, it is quiet possible to emulate PSX or N64 games. Recently, ZodTTD, who is famous for developing and porting homebrew emulator to various embedded OS based handhelds, started porting his PSX and N64 emulators to Android OS. The future for Android handhelds emulation is not that gloomy.

Even though its relatively high price (299 USD for Application Developer Edition), I guess it's worth buying for people who wanna indulge into world of Android based Emulation monster.

Below movie shows what this device can do in gaming, have a grip on it.