I have always been a fan of DIY, which stands for Do It Yourself, and that's because one cannot only get a cheaper product, but mostly because one can get a better product, completely built to his or her mood and desire. Speaker-wise, you can build the exact cabinet you like, without paying outrageous amounts of money for a custom design, but it does involve some time indeed, besides more than comprehensive knowledge.

Just like speakers and others, DIY devices are also cheaper, but in this case usually follow some prescribed recipe or technical instructions. I really don't agree with the concept of pre-made PCBs (printed circuit boards) with attached components, a couple of screws and other components, being called DIY. It's not DIY, but merely assembly. Such kits could be compared to dough, as in - you can't say you baked some donuts when you only bought the dough and just fried it.

A similar case is the DIY tablet kit from Liquidware. It's called a DIY tablet starter kit, actually, and it includes a touchscreen OLED display measuring 4.3 inches diagonally, but only boasting a poor resolution of 480 x 272 pixels. With a resistive touch technology, the kit operates on the included BeagleBoard, namely a single PCB computer running a 720MHz ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3530 CPU, 2GB worth of NAND flash and even a slot for SD memory cards.

The kit is complete with the BeagleJuice battery module and bundled with an SD memory card pre-loaded with Angstrom Linux. Customers will only have to put the pieces together and start chiseling their own chassis, start designing the software pack and plan the market approach. First of all, check with Liquidware and ask for your own kit, for $393.61.Quite thick if you look at it better, innit?


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