The Raspberry Pi 400 - A full computer in a keyboard!

hello and welcome back to learn linux tv the raspberry pi foundation keeps creating awesome stuff and right here in front of me is the raspberry pi 400 which is actually a complete computer built into this keyboard this new model of the raspberry pi kind of reminds me of those older computers that were also a full computer inside a keyboard for example the commodore 64 and just like the commodore 64 and other computers in that time period that had a similar concept and design the raspberry pi 400 can hook up to a television or a computer monitor now over the years i've read on several blogs from famous software engineers comments such as i got my start on the commodore 64 the apple ii or whatever computer they may have had at the time that they started and i almost wonder if we are going to go full circle and have a brand new round of software engineers in the future that might make comments such as i got my start on the raspberry pi 400. i really do think that this is a brilliant idea now to be fair it is a very simple idea but still brilliant i mean all they've done is they've put a raspberry pi in a keyboard but this is a full redesign of the raspberry pi this is not a raspberry pi 4 inside this case it's a brand new model that actually has a faster cpu needless to say i'm very excited to check this out and give you guys a full review actually i've already checked it out because i've had this in the studio for a while i'm recording this intro after i've already recorded all the other footage and the thing is i think the raspberry pi 400 is awesome but before we get into the full review i want to let you guys know about the sponsor for today's video which is actually well yours truly i've recently written a book mastering ubutu server third edition and it's going to be available very soon you can pre-order your copy right now and when it does come out and you get your copy it would be awesome if you could leave a review somewhere that would help me out quite a bit in addition to that i want to let you guys know about my patreon page if you are a patron of learn linux tv you will actually get early access to tutorial videos as well as a few others as a perk which means all the tutorials on my channel going forward all my patrons get those first sometimes up to a week or even more before the general public with that out of the way let's go ahead and dive into the raspberry pi 400 review i can't wait to show you guys now on my end i've purchased the raspberry pi 400 personal computer kit which is what you see on the screen right now it comes in a fairly standard but effective box once you remove the sleeve and open the box the pi 400 is revealed immediately as for the build the unit does have a sturdy feel to it so it doesn't feel cheap or anything it actually feels like a solid device and the ports for connecting all of your peripherals are all on the back of the unit more on that later and also in the box we get the official raspberry pi usbc power supply nothing too amazing here it's a standard power supply it looks to be the same one that you would get if you just purchased this power supply separately for any of the other raspberry pi models such as the raspberry pi 4. also in the box is an sd card adapter it actually belongs to the sd card that's actually included with the kit at least on my end the sd card was pre-installed into the pi 400 which is why it wasn't here in the case for the adapter next up we have the official mouse which is pretty cool i have another one of these in the house and it's not the most exciting mouse in the world but it is pretty decent and it's not going to win any awards for the most amazing mouse in the world but it's simple it's effective and it's pretty pleasant to use also in the box we get a micro hdmi to standard hdmi cable to facilitate hooking up a monitor to the pi 400 and in addition to that we also get the raspberry pi beginners guide in the box as well which has been fully updated for the pi 400. this is an awesome addition to say the least i love the fact that this is included because it's a great way to get somebody excited about diving into the raspberry pi platform as well as learning some of the things that they can do with the device all together what you see on the screen right now is what you get in the box it's a really awesome kit and it's highly recommended if you want something simple to get you started now like i mentioned a bit earlier i really like the build quality of this device it doesn't feel cheap at all the keyboard is great it's very comfortable to type on and i really love that we have a fully integrated computer into this keyboard because all you have to do is just connect your power cable the mouse display and maybe a usb device or two and you have a full operating environment right from this keyboard now in my end i plugged in a portable display i thought it was pretty cool to have a portable display plugged into this unit i think that the portable display and its small footprint fits in quite nice with the small footprint of this device right here so that's what i used for the majority of the review now for the desktop capture footage that i'm going to be getting to shortly you will notice a bit of lag most likely because it's really hard to click on things with my screen recorder and i'm trying to get that fixed but you know how things go it's going to take some time so you can basically ignore that part of it and we could go ahead and switch over to see some desktop footage from this device when you first start it up it's going to immediately restart because it's going to resize the partition on the sd card to meet the boundary of the sd card to make sure that you benefit from all of the available space on that card and then when it comes back up it's actually going to show you a first run wizard which will help you get it configured and ready to go everything in the configuration screens are fairly straightforward such as setting your language and password and initially there's black borders around the screen but a checkbox came up that allowed me to automatically fix that problem and then when it rebooted the black borders went away so that did the job just fine also in the first run wizard it had me set up wifi which is pretty easy to do and then it had me install all of the updates to make sure that everything was well up to date now the updates took a very very very long time to install so i felt like i was waiting an eternity now it could be the case that the sd card is actually kind of slow i'm sure they're not going to give you the fastest sd card available because that would increase their cost so if you notice any slowdown you might need to buy a better sd card or at least a faster one now the sd card does pass all of the diagnostics so i don't really feel like there's an issue with the sd card but if you are concerned about speed you might want to upgrade to a faster one i feel like any time it was waiting on the sd card this unit was very slow but the cpu was actually very fast for anything that wasn't waiting on io so that leads me to believe that the sd card is actually the culprit i will be trying a faster sd card on this unit later on but i just wanted to make you guys aware of that once you get everything set up the desktop environment of raspberry pi os is pretty good although a bit basic but if you're simply wanting to do some coding maybe visit a few web pages the pre-installed distribution is perfectly fine for the task high dpi support isn't all that great though and i had to fumble around a bit with the settings in order to get it to look passable on a 4k display the pixel doubling feature isn't enabled by default on such a high resolution display and it was very difficult for me to find the setting because the font size was initially so small that the screen was virtually unreadable for me i eventually did find the setting and i got that enabled so i was able to support a full 4k resolution and actually have everything be readable on the screen but it would have been nice if this was an out of the box kind of thing and not something that i had to set up after the fact now the lack of proper 4k support out of the box at least in my test was a bit of a letdown to me i would have preferred to have that work out of the box but again once i got pixel doubling enabled on the unit it was actually perfectly fine from that point forward and that's my only complaint when it comes to raspberry pi os it's actually fairly decent the raspberry pi os it comes with basically everything you would possibly need to get productive right away it even comes with a full office suite and some other utilities as well there's definitely a lot of great software here included by default now one downside though is that this unit only has four gigabytes of ram which is actually a bit of a letdown but i do understand that if they were to include more than that it would have increased the cost and i bet they were just trying to get the cost under a certain point and that makes sense they wanted to make sure that this is accessible to as many people as possible but when you add web browsing into the mix and start opening a bunch of tabs i feel like you're going to see the four gigabytes of ram slip away pretty quickly but then again as long as you keep an eye on how many tabs you have open at any given time it's probably going to be fine the keyboard itself feels nice to type on the keys are responsive and the key travel is acceptable i don't think the keyboard will compare with the keyboards on thinkpad laptops or anything like that but you know what it's fine now it does seem to feel a bit hollow as you type on it but it doesn't actually feel cheap so it's not really that big of a deal and i don't think it's the most amazing keyboard that i've ever used but i do like it quite a bit and i don't have any actual complaints it's not going to win any awards but i think it's perfectly fine for the task now when it comes to ports on the back of the unit it has a single usb 2 port which is probably best for the included mouse it has two usb 3.0 ports two micro hdmi ports four displays and a single usbc port but that's actually going to be used to deliver power to the unit now notice that there's no 3.5 millimeter audio jack here so if you have desktop speakers that you want to use then you're going to need something like a usb amp in order for that to be possible but it does deliver audio through hdmi so if you are using a display with audio speakers built in then you'll get your audio through that now i've really enjoyed my time that i've spent with the raspberry pi 400 i think it's an awesome device potentially a game changer and i highly recommend that you check it out if you have one already let me know in the comments down below what you think of the raspberry pi 400 and what you're using it for and in the meantime click that like button if you like this video and also subscribe because i have more reviews and even some tutorials coming very soon and i'll see you then thanks for watching do you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 12,802

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, raspberry pi, pi, rpi, raspbian, raspberry pi os, 400, raspberry pi 400, pi 400, pi keyboard, keyboard, raspberry pi 4, raspberry pi kit, raspberry pi desktop, raspi 400, raspberry pi keyboard, raspberry pi 400 kit, raspberry pi desktop kit, raspberry pi desktop replacement, raspberry pi desktop computer, new raspberry pi 2020

Id: Hn8oFBl4mTA

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020