I always liked small laptops and phones – but for some reason they fell out of favor of manufacturers (“bigger is more better”). Now if one wanted to get tiny laptop – one of the few opportunities would have been to fight for old Sony UMPC’s on ebay which are somewhat expensive even today. Recently Raspberry Pi/CM4-based tiny laptops started to appear – especially clockwork products are neat, but they are not foldable like a laptop. When in summer of 2023 Sipeed announced Lichee Console 4A based on RISC-V SoC – I preordered it immediately and in early January I finally received it. Results of my testing, currently uncovered issues are below.
↫ Mikhail Svarichevsky
I want one of these.
Where can I get this as a case for a Pi?!?
Adurbe,
Good question. I am also looking to build a “raspberry pi laptop”, but so far the options are either expensive, or lackluster.
For example, there is CrowPi:
https://www.crowpi.cc/
However at $300 it costs as much as a low end Chromebook. I can’t blame them for the price. For a low volume product, it is actually quite cheap.
(Or others in similar range: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3065)
There is Piper Computer Kits. It is a real good exercise, My older one really liked building it, and learned a lot. However it is bulky, and not actually a general purpose computer.
https://www.playpiper.com/
If you are into soldering / tinkering, you can even do your own “mini Thinkpad”
https://www.instructables.com/Raspberry-Pi-and-Arduino-Laptop/
Or even go full in, and retrofit an older Thinkpad shell:
https://davidrowntree.co.uk/retrofitting-a-lenovo-t520-with-a-raspberry-pi-cm4-part-1/
(But I think that project is incomplete).
Nevertheless none of them is currently a “definite choice”.
(Btw, more discussion at:
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/the-best-raspberry-pi-laptop-kits
and https://all3dp.com/2/best-raspberry-pi-laptop-kits-projects/)
You can (eventually) get a MNT Pocket Reform and put a RPi CM4 module in it:
https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-06-20-introducing-mnt-pocket-reform.html
(waiting for my comment to show up anytime… had a list of various options, but still pending moderation)
You can get a GPD pocket 2 or pocket 3 used for cheap from china at times.
You can get all manner of cheap pocket laptops from China, that isn’t the point here. This is (as far as I know) the only RISC-V based tiny laptop available. That’s the draw for people like Thom (and me) who want a more or less complete product based on unique architectures like RISC-V; sure it’s going to be buggy and slow at first, but the more people get their hands on it and tinker with it, the better the ecosystem becomes, and everyone benefits.
I was expecting this thing to clobber my GPD Micro in battery runtime. What I want is something exactly like the GPD Micro, but with a better CPU and more memory, and battery life.
Too bad the market for things like this is practically non-existent, so we don’t see manufacturers racing to out-do each other constantly like they do with phones.
The problem is that battery runtime for mobile devices becomes dominated by the LCD…
cb88,
Switching to OLED displays help a little, since they are more energy efficient by design. (Though most of the time this is countered by ramping up brightness as there is more “power budget”)