The Future is Made of Cotton Candy

I know this because last month a little-known company called FXI announced a device called Cotton Candy. Cotton Candy is a full-blown Linux computer about the size of a USB flash drive. The specs are actually fairly impressive:

FXI Cotton Candy
  • Dual core 1.2GHz processor
  • 1GB RAM
  • Mali 400 GPU (video card) that’s capable of HD video
  • Wi-Fi
  • Bluetooth
  • And more.

The upshot? It’s designed to run Android, Ubuntu, or act as a thin client in a virtual desktop infrastructure.

For me, this is terrific because I’ve been looking for a way to turn my 1 year old LCD TV into a “Smart TV” without purchasing another box to sit on my entertainment stand. I don’t want another box, and realistically I don’t need another box. The FXI is really ideal – running Ubuntu would give me a full blown computer capable of watching video, browsing the web, even editing files. Running Android would give me access to my Google profile, all of my Android apps (including games), and so on.

All this from the same size device that you use to carry around 4GB, 8GB or more data. And it costs $199. Sweet.