Over the last few months the Asian manufacturer Shenzhen Xunlong Software has released a number of capable open-spec single board computers with the ‘Orange Pi’ label that are both Linux and Android-ready. Their latest offering is the Orange Pi PC which packs an Allwinner (Cortex-A7) quad-core H3 SoC running at 1.6 GHz, priced at just $15. That’s less than half the price of the latest Raspberry Pi board which uses the Broadcom processor based around the same quad cores but running at 900 MHz.

The other main difference is with the graphics processor; the RPi uses a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU while the Orange Pi PC uses an ARM Mali-400 MP2 GPU. Together with the main processor this gives it the capability to run 4K video playback and can run Android, Lubuntu, Debian and Rasberry Pi Image. Both boards offer an HDMI video port and Ethernet connectivity but the Orange Pi PC has an OTG micro USB port (not for power) and one less USB 2.0 port. They also both feature 1 GB on board RAM and rely on a microSD socket for external storage. The Orange Pi PC also includes a 40-pin Pi-compatible header, an IR sensor and an integrated microphone.

The company doesn’t make any claim that the Orange Pi PC is a drop-in replacement for the RPi even though it uses similar 26-way and 40-way expansion headers. At 85 x 55 mm, the Orange Pi PC is just 1 mm narrower than the Raspberry Pi 2. The board is currently stocked by AliExpress in the US.