Playing around with the MeeGo Pad T01, the £50 credit card size computer for your TV

A few weeks ago I ordered the latest MeeGo Pad T01 which is an amazing small computer, unlike the Raspberry Pi with its ARM based processor - the MeeGo Pad has a full Intel quad core bay trail based cpu with UEFI bios which means it can run ANY operating system that your every day computer or laptop can run and most amazingly it is smaller than a credit card and costs just £50. The spec's are very similar to the £90 PiPO W2 tablet that I purchased earlier on in the year.

Here are the specs of the model that I purchased:

• Intel Atom Z3735F “Bay Trail” quad core processor @ 1.33 GHz (Bust freq: 1.83 GHz)
• 2 GB DDR3L-1333 (64-bit up to 10.6 GB/s)
• Intel HD graphics Gen 7
• 32 GB eMMC + micro SD slot up to 64GB
• Outputs via a single HDMI 1.4 port at 1080p
• 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0
• 2x micro USB ports, 1x USB 2.0 port
• Dimensions are 11 cm x 3.9 cm x 1 cm
• Weights just 50 grams
• Pre-installed with a trial licensed version of Windows 8.1.
• Comes with really nice leather case and cables.

Although it did come with a usb power cable and plug, I found that the MeeGo Pad powered faultlessly off my TV's internal USB ports making the main adapter obsolete in this scenario.

The first thing that I did was what any other geek would do... I got it hooked up to the TV in the office and checked how much space was available on the internal storage (10.8GB), how responsive the Windows operating system was and then connected up to our Wi-Fi and downloaded Minecraft to test the overall speed. The download and install was really quick and Minecraft ran very well on default settings (Fancy) I would consider it very playable maintaining roughly 20 fps but this was not the reason I bought the MeeGo Pad.

As the MeeGo Pad only arrived two days ago, I have not had much time to play but I have figured out that F7 on boot will load the bios/boot menu and I can successfully boot into Ubuntu Live USB 64 bit without any problems. I have also worked out that if I unplug the MeeGo Pad from HDMI or not plug it in at all then it continues to function perfectly which will be great for linux, SSH or even RDP.

Moving forward I would like to try a few different flavours of Linux operating systems and I may even setup a little LAMP environment. Ultimately, it may end up running Ubuntu, Windows 7 or Windows 10 as like most people - I can not stand windows 8.