"It's 100% Compatible to the Raspberry Pi!"
 
"You can use your Raspberry Pi Bootable SD Cards to boot up the Orange Pi!"
 
"It's 1/2 the price of the Raspberry Pi!"
 
For over the past year I have been seeing this and have been wanting an Orange Pi to try it out. The price is right, about 1/2 the price of the Raspberry PI - under $20; $15 in some mail order houses. But some places like Bang Good (.com) and Ali Express (.com) are selling them at the lowest price possible but are in Hong Kong - which means a 2 - 4 month wait in shipping as it goes to America on a very slow boat and goes through custom. It is that fear of waiting for so long that kept me from buying one.
 
Then recently, there were a few sellers on Ebay selling them for a couple dollars more, but again, they were selling from Hong Kong. They did have a 48 hour shipping by DSL for $50, but who is going to pay $50 for a $19 computer?
 
Then my local Raspberry Pi Dealer - Tinkersphere - started to sell a couple models of the Orange Pi, so I bought one of each they had:
The Orange Pi One; Quad Core CPU with 512MB RAM, Ethernet and 2 USB Port - $19
The Orange Pi Litei; Quad Core CPU with 512MB RAM, Wifi - No Ethernet and 3 USB Port -  $22
The Orange Pi PC; Quad Core CPU with 1GB RAM, Ethernet and 3 USB Port - $25
 
Got them for less than $75 for all 3.
 
All have HDMI and Composite Video audio (from the composite jack), and the CPUs are 1.2 GHz (expect for the O-Pi PC which is 1.6).
 
This is great. But there are the issues and problems. I found out that they are made in China by Shezhen Xunlong Software Co., LTD. but yet they are sold by Hong Kong sellers.
 
Hype Killing:
 
Are they 1/2 the price of a Raspberry Pi?
 
Almost as it depends on where you are buying it from. So I will say that this hype is true; the lowest one can get it from Ali Express and Bang Good is $15. In fact Ali Express has one on sale for $10!
 
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/all-wholesale-products/1553371.html
 
But now the problem: It is 100% compatible to the Raspberry Pi? Can it use an SD Card formatted for the Raspberry Pi to boot it?
 
It is not 100% Compatible to the Raspberry Pi. It cant be. And it does not boot from a Raspberry Pi SD Card. The main reason is because the processor used. The R-Pi uses the Cortex Arm CPU by Arm & Broadband. The O-Pi uses the AllWinner CPU designed by Arm and used by many tablet and smartphone Android systems. Due to differences in the memory may of the processors, the two systems can not be compatible.
 
It does try to emulate the R-Pi GPIO but there are problems with that. Shenzhen Xunlong also screwed up on the SD Card Driver, the Orange Pi can only accept Class 10 SD Cards, not Class 4. And it can not read the Raspberry Pi formatted SD Cards because it's boot-block is different.
 
So where did this Hype came from?
 
The Original Orange Pi (V1) that came out 2 years ago was "100% compatible" to the R-Pi. But they undid all that and went for something else. They try to keep the GPIO compatibility but there are problems with that. And adding insult to injury, the AllWinner CPU uses the Mali 400 GPU (Graphics Processor) in a dual core package. The Mali 400 GPU is capable of high speed large video formats, is crippled in the O-Pi. Well, it is crippled in the Linux Version the Shenzhen Xulong company distributes. If you get your Linux from an outside source, you will get a lot of the missing pieces S-X left out. But if you tell them that you are using somebody else's Linux, they cut off all support to you. This is so bad that the AllWinner Software Development Group had abandoned S-X and the Orange Pi.
 
S-X wants its users to figure it out on their own. Why? Don't know. They do not want other companies setting foot on their System, despite using the Debian Arm Branch of Linux for the O-Pi (Raspbian, Ubuntu and several others they have), they do not want Debian's involvement, despite Armbian being the best Linux Distro made for the AllWinner System the O-Pi has.
 
It requires its own 5V/2A power supply; a "Micro USB Cellphone Charger" will not work. It will, but you need a USB to 2.5mm jack adapter for it. The USB Micro Port on the O-Pi is not for powering it but is an actual USB Port.
 
In its way, the O-Pi is more like the Banana Pi than the Raspberry Pi. I seen another Hype of "The O-Pi can use the SD card formatted for the B-Pi!" This might be possible because the B-Pi also uses the AllWinner Chip. But I can not test it; as is my B-Pi uses the the full size SD Card and they are Class 4. I would need to get a Micro SD Card and burn Raspbian for the B-Pi that I have for it to test on the O-Pi. I'll post up results of such tests when I complete it.
 
As for size, the O-Pi One and O-Pi Lite are as big as the Raspberry Pi Model A+. The O-Pi PC is thinner but longer than the Raspberry Pi B+ series. There are others in the O-Pi family with added hardware but they cost more, as high as $55. For $50 the O-Pi Plus 2 has a SATA Drive interface and 16GB of Flash RAM.
 
The O-Pi is clunky, difficult to set up and a lot is missing or not working. 1/2 of the software was "stolen" from the Banana Pi, and yet, it does not work. I'm still working on the three I have. Otherwise, the O-Pi would have been great system if it was not a system you bang your head on the desk from it. It's like that car you want so much but it is a money pit and often needs repairs or hard to find parts.

I've had a few cars like that - not enough time or money to get needed parts to fix. The Fiat X 1/9 I had was one of them. Great little car but it needed more attention than a pregnant girlfriend.
 
The O-Pi is a great little computer, but it is not for the inexperienced. If one wants something easy, go for the R-Pi. If you know your stuff and can work around the issues and problems, the O-Pi is great. They (the O-Pi One and O-Pi Lite) are tiny boards, a bit smaller than the R-Pi Model A+ but a bit larger than The C.H.I.P. but has a whole lot more than either machine like more USB Ports and the Quad Core CPU.
 
I would recommend getting Armbian (Debian for the Arm CPU) directly from Debian and not from orangepi.org. S-X's support is damn crappy and that is sad. They should be supportive and accepting of Debian, despite using Debian Linux Kernel as the core of their OS and then strip it down to nothing as Debian (through Raspbian, Bananian, Ubuntu and many others) when it is not stripped own runs so well on the Arm CPU. I had to laugh for a second, seeing some stolen items on the O-Pi Raspbian version coming from the Banana Pi and the "stolen" routines like expanding the files system not working on the O-Pi. There is a way to fix that by redoing the partition table, but that is something not for the faint of heart.
 
I have not tested it out on a battery yet, but from what I am reading in terms of power needs, the O-Pi will probably run for 45 minutes on one of those 2600 cellphone battery power cells.