Huawei and Google team up for the first Android development board, similar to the Raspberry Pi

Android developers had one serious problem that made their jobs much harder up until now – they had to develop software for the platform using hardware that's completely different in just about any way. The community wanted an ARM-based development platform for quite some time now, hoping it would make things easier, and it finally has it.

Huawei has introduced the HiKey 960 board – an ARM-based development board that comes with all the essentials one would need. It employs Huawei's latest octa-core processor – the Kirin 960 – complete with the Mali-G71 GPU, 32 GB of storage and 3 GB of RAM. This makes for a development board that's on par with most modern smartphones, when it comes to performance.

The board also comes with two USB 3.0 ports, one USB Type-C, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1. There is also an HDMI port, but it supports resolution of up to 1920 x 1080 pixels, while the GPU is capable of handling 4K output.

Similar to the Raspberry Pi, the HiKey 960 comes with a variety of pins, so developers can hook up whatever they want to the board.

The HiKey 960's default OS is the official open-source version of Android. Google officially supports the board, along with its weaker sibling, the HiKey 620.

The HiKey 960 costs $240 and it will ship to the US, European Union and Japan in early May, before making it to developers worldwide.

via PCWorld