Cotton Candy (single-board computer)


The Cotton Candy is a very small, fanless single-board computer on a stick, putting the full functions of a personal computer on a device the size of a USB memory stick, manufactured by the Norwegian-based hardware and software for-profit startup company FXI Technologies.

Overview

Cotton Candy is a low-power ARM architecture CPU based computer which uses dual-core processors such as the dual-core 1.2 GHz Exynos 4210 SoC by Samsung, featuring a quad-core 200 MHz ARM Mali-400 MP GPU OpenGL ES 2.0 capable 2D/3D graphics processing unit, an Audio and Video Decoder hardware engine, and TrustZone Cryptographic Engine and Security Accelerator co-processor. The platform is said to be able to stream and decode H.264 1080p content, and be able to use desktop class interfaces such as KDE or GNOME under Linux.
FXI Technologies claims it will run both Android 4.0 and the latest Ubuntu Desktop Linux operating systems, leveraging Linaro builds and Linux kernel optimizations.
As of 13 September 2012, FXI started to ship to those that pre-ordered devices. At the time of writing, the Cotton Candy is generally available. FXI have also made a Beta android ICS image and Beta Linux image available for download.
On 16 of July 2014, FXI declared bankruptcy.

Reception

In January 2012 the Cotton Candy made it to the top-10 finalist at the "Last Gadget Standing" new technology competition at CES 2012. Also at CES 2012, LaptopMag.com made Cotton Candy a top-10 finalist for its "Readers’ Choice for Best of CES 2012" award. EFYTimes News Network as well named FXI Technologies Cotton Candy a "Top 10 Gadgets Launched @ CES 2012".