The beagleboard (.org) is way cooler than this thing. Its $149 and has a much more powerful ARM processor with a built-in DSP and 3d accelerator (probably similar to the chip powering the iPhone). It already has an HDMI/DVI output and can also output S-Video. Probably similar in size as well. It has linux running on it already as well.
Be careful. The video hardware drivers on the beagleboard will not be open source. There will be open source kernel modules, but the real stuff will be binary only and no doubt supported for only as long as it serves the IP house that owns those cores.
I agree, the only advantage I see in this product is as a potential teaching tool. There isn't a lot of opensource hardware out there to go with all that software.
This board looses in all categories I would consider important when choosing an embedded linux board. Those being speed, size, and price. As you mentioned for a comparable price Beagle Board is much faster with cooler i/o features. If you are going for price and size the lowest cost Gumstix (gumstix.com) is like a third the size, slightly more powerful and only costs 100 bucks.
Even as a teaching tool it would suck because it's all surface mount. Sure you could just buy all the parts, but it'd be near impossible to get surface mount working reliably in a classroom environment.
My buddies built a robot controller using a gumstix board running linux, so for doing robots like the article said its pretty shitty for being bigger and probably having higher power draw.
Most things are SMT these days. You can still solder SMT by hand w/o much trouble. People are just intimidated by it. It's a lot easier than it looks. There are some great video tutorials on youTube as well as at sparkfun.com and http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solderin...
Sure. But unless it's a board assembly class, the students will spend an inordinate amount of time becoming proficient at soldering, removing solder bridges and replacing burned out chips.
I wonder what the size comparison is to the beagleboard. We are playing around with a beagleboard in our office and the thing is pretty impressive, for the price it might be the best choice for a single board computer right now. The OMAP3 processor on it is impressive, it is smaller and cheaper than comparably powerful ARM chips.
