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Lenovo announces own compute stick in Ideacentre Stick 300

By Koh Wanzi - on 25 Jun 2015, 10:13am

Lenovo announces own compute stick in Ideacentre Stick 300

The Lenovo Ideacentre Stick 300 is an obvious challenge to the Intel Compute Stick. (Image Source: Lenovo)

The Intel Compute Stick just got company. Lenovo has announced the Ideacentre Stick 300, a computer-on-a-stick that – like the Intel Compute Stick – turns any HDMI-equipped display into a fully-functioning computer for media streaming, web browsing and content creation.

The specifications closely mirror that of the Compute Stick, with a quad-core 1.33GHz Intel Bay Trail Z3735F processor, 2GB of memory, and up to 32GB of storage. Lenovo hasn’t provided as much detail as Intel on the speed of the RAM or exact type of storage, but other than that, the hardware looks almost identical. As a result, we'll probably see a similarly limited performance on the Stick 300.

The Ideacentre Stick 300 also sports the same smattering of ports as the Compute Stick, with a single micro USB port for power, a USB 2.0 Type-A port, and a micro SD card reader.

Like the Intel Compute Stick, the Ideacentre Stick 300 sports a single USB 2.0 Type-A port, a micro USB port for power, and a micro SD card slot on the other side. (Image Source: Lenovo)

Support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi is similarly lacking, and the Ideacentre Stick 300 will support 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. We don’t have details on the exact wireless module used in the Stick 300 either, so there’s no saying if it performs better than the 1x1 Realtek RTL8723BS card on the Compute Stick.

At 100 x 38 x 15mm, it is shorter than the Compute Stick (103.4 x 37.6 x 12.5mm) but slightly wider and thicker. But given how close the display connectors on monitors and TVs are to each other sometimes, it might have been more practical to make a longer but slimmer device that wouldn’t eat into the space of adjacent ports.

However, according to the spec sheet Lenovo provided, the Stick 300 looks like it comes with 0.5L speakers. That’s one feature that the Compute Stick doesn’t have, but we’re not quite sold on the practicality and quality of such an implementation since many displays already have built-in speakers.

The Ideacentre Stick 300 will ship with Windows 8.1 with Bing, which means it is also eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 10 on July 29. At US$129, it also undercuts the US$149 Intel Compute Stick (S$229 locally) and comes bundled with a three-month trial of Microsoft Office 365. It is expected to be available in July.

Source: Lenovo

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