Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Great value for the price
The ASUS Tinker Board offers performance that outclasses other single-board computers in this price range. It can easily be used as a daily PC substitute and it can easily handle some tasks that competitors (like the Pi 3 for example) find difficult. Things like image editing, streaming Full HD videos, and even playing some simple browser-based games can easily be done on the Tinker Board.
Pro The official OS is quite complete out of the box
You can get the official Linux image for the Tinker Board website. It's actually a customized version of Debian that's changed to work as smoothly as possible on Tinker Board's hardware.
It comes with all the essential applications every PC has nowadays (web browser, text, editor, etc.) and some more specialized tools that are used to control the GPIO pins and that allow more advanced users to "talk" to the hardware.
Pro Unique and pleasant aesthetic
Unlike most boards on the market, the ASUS Tinker Board is rather aesthetically pleasing as well. It has an array of colours which help distinguish the different connectors. Especially nice are the GPIO pin headers which are all colour-coded to identify the various types of pins.
Pro Previous Raspberry Pi owners will find themselves at ease with the GPIO library
The Tinker Board uses the same GPIO libraries as Raspberry Pi does. This means that users coming from Raspberry Pi who want to play around with the Tinker Board's GPIO pins will find it very easy to do so.
Cons
Con The support behind it is lacking
The technical support provided by ASUS is rather lacking, compared to competitors and knowing how important ASUS is in the tech world. The documentation is lacklustre, the official website is filled with marketing-speak without any actual valuable information for someone who has already bought the board, and to top it off, the download link for the official OS is hidden away inside the ASUS website in the drivers section.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Con Useless as embedded controlller
From a review:
"There is no manufacture sponsored community for this product, there is no source code for the current kernel, there is no real documentation on how the board is logically laid out, the distro is poorly done, no modules, so effectively is just a tiny motherboard that runs Linux, what it isn't is much of a basis for an embedded application that uses any of the features the board has implemented, or anything that isn't already compiled into the kernel.
No source, no modules, and very little documentation means the Tinkerboard is essentially limited to being a platform to run applications, but ineffective as a platform to develop an embedded control process, which is generally what these type of boards are created to do."
Also, there is no serial port support in the Python library. Also, there is no official Java library and the 3dr party Java lib does not support serial. So what is the point of all the serial ports?