Inside Raspberry Pi

I think a $25 model B is probably a little out of reach, though as you say there are economy of scale advantages to having a single RAM SKU. Perhaps a RAM upgrade for the model A might make sense in the medium term.

Faster cards do offer better performance. We currently have boot issues with the very fastest cards, which we hope to resolve soon, but you definitely see a difference between a good Kingston card and a no-name one.

The ARM is already fairly close to the edge at 700MHz; without overvolting the chip (which decreases lifetime), there's not much more than 100MHz of overclocking headroom on typical silicon. We do offer a clock speed tweak option in the boot configuration parameters, so if you get lucky and get a fast part you can exploit it.

I was on the team that designed the graphics core, so I'm a little biased here, but I genuinely believe we have the best mobile GPU team in the world at Broadcom in Cambridge. What's really striking is how badly Tegra 2 performs relative even to simple APs using licensed Imagination Technologies (TI and Apple) or ARM Mali (Samsung) graphics. To summarise, BCM2835 has a tile mode architecture - so it kills immediate-mode devices like Tegra on fill-rate - and we've chosen to configure it with a very large amount of shader performance, so it does very well on compute-intensive benchmarks, and should double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content.

All the media features are to some extent a bonus, but they've been a part of our thinking ever since I joined Broadcom five years ago (having spent a year trying to build a $25 PC out of openly-available parts like Atmel microcontrollers). I think there's a lot to be said for a device which is useful for something other than programming. The media features provide a "hook" to draw people to the platform; once we have them hooked, we can trick them into becoming programmers!

I think the various balloon and satellite projects have taken us by surprise, but the most unusual one, which turned up very shortly after our first announcement, came from some guys who want to boot into a Sinclair QL emulator and put it inside a QL case. Most of the project suggestions we've seen have fallen into one of a small number of camps (media centre, car automation, home automation).

I don't know an enormous amount about Open Pandora, but it looks fairly similar in terms of feature set. I'm sure we'll see migration of applications in both directions between the platforms.

The Gertboard, as it's called, has been put together by one of the Broadcom engineers I mentioned earlier. It provides buffered digital I/O, brushed DC motor drive, and an Atmel AVR chip like you find in an Arduino to do analog and low latency I/O. We think it's got potential in a lot of small to medium scale embedded control markets, including home and factory automation, and obviously "physical computing" is a hot topic in IT education right now (witness the success of PICAXE and the like).

We'd have no objections at all, and in fact are working with a number of third-party case manufacturers, including a number who primarily build custom gaming-PC cases. Everything we do is aimed at fostering this sort of community activity, whether it's around software, accessories, or (in due course) licensed and open-source clone manufacture. We're a small organisation which does one thing well; we certainly don't want to stand in the way of third parties who want to add value and make money around the platform.

The games industry has an enormous part to play in solving this problem. We'd like to see companies chip in with tutorials, free asset packs, internships, coding competitions with decent-sized prizes. One of the challenges facing kids today is that AAA content is so far beyond what they can reasonably hope to achieve, so casual games provide a nice target; this is why we're concentrating on working with companies like YoYo Games to give kids the tools they need to write the next Angry Birds rather than the next Modern Warfare.

Another 10,000 units, and another! We're able to scale to the 100,000 unit per annum point with our existing supply of working capital, so we're hopeful in due course that we can catch up with demand. In the medium term, we want to enable other companies to manufacture these devices, which adds a whole new tier of scalability.