The abusive price of electronics in Brazil

Last month, I've heard about the Raspberry Pi project. It's about a US$25~35 board, with an 700 MHz ARM processor (the Broadcom BCM 2835), 128/256 MB of RAM, USB, HDMI and Ethernet (depending of the model) connectors. Those boards are suposed to run some Linux distributions (initially Fedora and Debian) and programming languages such as Python, Java, C (and others), and it's aimed to educational proposes (but can you imagine the things that could be possible to do with such hardware?)

Raspberry Pi Beta board

I've been very excited with the news that the Raspberry Pi final boards would be finished in December/2011 or January/2012, and they would be sold first in United Kingdom and maybe in the United States. Although, at the same time, I got worried about the possibility of that board never come to Brazil (the country I live) or to become a very expensive product that only few people could get access to. Since it's not being sold yet (until the publication of this post), I had a hope that all my worries could not become true.

Today, I knew that there is another similar project, but with a board (the BeagleBoard) that is more sophisticated than the Raspberry Pi, and is being sold for the recommended price of US$149 in the rest of the world, but in Brazil, due to a restriction of Texas Instruments that prohibits brazilians to buy that board directly from the United States through the Internet, it costs about R$850~975 !!!

Recommended price of BeagleBoard

BeagleBoard being sold in a brazilian store for R$ 859

Just for comparison, today US$1,00 is about R$1,90. So, we can conclude is that the BeagleBoard is being sold for, at least, 3 times it's recommended price.

BeagleBoard being sold in another brazilian store for R$975 !!!!

I really hope that the Raspberry Pi can become a reality in brazilian education (from schools to universities), and I can't wait to get my own board. But if it costs much more than US$25~35, I'm sure that the dream is really, really over!