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Cotton Candy: An Android PC on a USB stick

Does having a PC that you can hold in the palm of your hand excite you? Then get ready to be excited. A company called FXI Technologies has announced plans to release such a device. It's called Cotton Candy and it's basically what we described; a tiny PC that runs the Android 2.3 operating system that's about the size of a USB flash drive stick.

There is indeed a USB connection on one side of Cotton Candy but that's mainly for connecting the device to a power outlet. The other end has a HDMI connection that can be used to connect Cotton Candy to a laptop or a monitor with an HDMI port or a big screen TV. The product also has Bluetooth support for things like PC mice, remote controllers and more.

Inside Cotton Candy there is an ARM Cortex-A9 processor running at 1.2GHz. There's also a quad-core based ARM Mali-400MP GPU along with 1 GB of memory, WiFi support, storage for up to 64 GB via a microSD card and more.

The device could be used to turn any HDMI-based television into a "smart PC" or you could hook it up to an HDMI-enabled laptop to create a second OS on your notebook, among other options.

So when will we get a chance to try out Cotton Candy? FXI says that they are developing prototypes to send out to PC manufacturers but that we likely won't see any PCs with this compact design before the second half of 2012.

Image via FXI Technologies

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