14 DAY TRIAL // Compact form factors are becoming more and more popular nowadays, especially with how practically every circuit and chip keeps getting smaller and smaller, but Foxconn seems to have gone beyond what most companies try when it made the Nettop NT-535.
The IT industry long ago learned that variety is key on a market where prospective customers are interested in devices intended for specific task sets.
Granted, desktops and notebooks sell massively because they can accomplish most any sort of operation, depending on the power of the hardware inside them.
Nevertheless, special-purpose electronics exist in great numbers and are either unique in their design and usefulness, or less feature-packed versions of other device types.
One might rightfully say nettops are less mighty desktops that sacrifice much of what they could do in order to achieve a very compact form factor (and a low price).
Nettops are, by definition, small, as they have only what it takes to browse the web, edit documents and pretty much perform just entry-level tasks, though HD and better multimedia playback seems to be getting included more and more often as well.
The new such device form Foxconn is even called nettop, Nettop NT-535 to be exact, and is meant for playback of multimedia while sticking to a very small frame.
In fact, the main asset of the Nettop NT-535 is that it can cope with true HD (high definition) playback even while featuring a form factor smaller than that of the average router.
The Broadcom BCM70015 Crystal HD single-chip media processor is the one responsible for PC streaming of Blu-ray, file-based and TV content, while the Chrontel CH7036 can convert LVDS signal into HDMI/DVI, among other things.
Still, the main hardware is a dual-core Intel Atom D525 CPU (1.8GHz), up to 4 GB RAM and Gigabit LAN, plus WiFi, VGA and HDMI connectors.
“With the NT-535 Foxconn is able to offer customers all the advantages of DDR3 and super-smooth HD playback in a casing that is smaller than most routers.” said Stephen Ling, Managing Director for Foxconn, Western Europe.