Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Are you a fish or a pony?

Update: I finally got up the courage to pop the case off my Cr-48 Fish. Below is an image of the motherboard with the bottom covering laying over top of it. Note the white sticker at the bottom left which is under the motherboard directly underneath the RAM slot. It says Rev: 2.00. Every disassembled Pony I can find on the Internet is Rev: 1.00. It looks like Fish have a revised motherboard. No idea what's changed still but it may be something pretty low level with the board schematics or electrical which would explain why Google is able to use the same Chrome OS image for the Pony and the Fish. It will be interesting to see if the next wave of Cr-48s going out are primarily Fish...



Update: So far we've had 68 responses to the survey and the results are overwhelmingly pony with just 5 respondents having a fish. Of those 5 fish, there doesn't seem to be any pattern in the results, one arrived as early as 12/10 another as late as 12/23. 4 were to mid-East Coast states but one was shipped to CA. Three respondents think they made a good test case for the Cr-48 but 2 think they just got lucky. You can see the raw data from the survey here. What do you think the difference is between a Pony and a Fish? Keep those conspiracy theories coming!

It seems there are two versions of the Cr-48 hardware. Some Cr-48s are labelled "IEC MARIO PONY 6101" and others "IEC MARIO FISH 2330". As far as I'm aware though, no one knows what the difference between the two models is. Google offers the same recovery image for both versions. So I'm conducting a short, 100% non-scientific survey to see what we can learn about the Cr-48s that are out there. If you have any thoughts as to what the difference between the two models might be, be sure to share in the comments section. By the way, you'll notice I feature a Amazon.com product in each post. These products should be compatible with the Cr-48 and purchasing via this link supports this blog. Don't have WiFi at home/work and 100mb 3G not enough? The Wii USB adapter works with the Cr-48 to give you cheap/fast ethernet connectivity!

11 comments:

  1. Perhaps it's to distinguish the production run each came off of?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm a fish. Southern california. Just received mine this morning... and was shocked! I signed up fully expecting to be rejected/ignored - although I am an avid Google-phyte... gmail/docs/voice/wave/etc. Early adopter & G1 android the morning it came out - I'm not a developer - not a tech blogger... frankly, this came straight of of left field. Never the less, I am totally stoked!

    ReplyDelete
  3. So happy I got mines today. It's a Fish, but I'm trying to find out what that means...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mine is a Pony 6101. Just got it last Tuesday. A shock to me as well. I had pretty much forgotten I had signed up for one on the 1st day they started accepting applications.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mines a fish! I received it Feb 7. Have you tried flashing the modded bios to the fish? I heard there were problems restoring back to stock for the fish (which the pony didn't have any much problem).

    Congrats to us!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I have a fish (received 2/2/11), and my brother who lives a county over got a fish as well. I've dual booted ubuntu, and the System Monitor claims I have these specs:
    2GB Memory
    Intel Atom N455 Dual Core at 1.66 ghz
    and Disk Utility claims I have a:
    ATA SanDisk 16gb P4 SSD

    I live in Northern Georgia.

    I find it interesting that most people say that the CR-48 has a single core cpu, while I don't. Hmm, wonder if that's the difference?
    Btw, I was a scientific applicant.

    ReplyDelete
  7. It is not a dual core it is just running 2 threads, sorry to disappoint.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I have a Fish! Won mine in a prize draw at the Google Apps roadshow in Melbourne, Australia in June.
    Can't use the 3G in Aust but great for round the house when you want to boot up quickly. I love it!

    ReplyDelete
  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  10. my system monitor also claims I have two Cores(threads)? I have a Fish and I got it right around last Christmas (i'm in california) here's a screenshot of my system monitor

    http://twitpic.com/7mct6k/full

    ReplyDelete