Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC – A Raspberry Pi 400 Alternative Powered by Rockchip RK3399

There is now an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 400 with the Orange Pi 800 PC keyboard that offers a very similar design, but is powered by a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core Cortex-A72/A53 processor,

Like the Raspberry Pi model, the Orange Pi 800 comes with 4GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, but it also adds 64GB of flash storage built-in and features a full-size HDMI port capable of 4Kp60 resolution plus a VGA port, instead of two micro HDMI ports.

Orange Pi 800 Specifications:

• SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2 Arm Cortex-A72 cores up to 1.8 GHz, 4 Arm Cortex-A53 cores up to 1.4 GHz and Arm Mali-T860MP4 GPU
• System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4
• Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot
• Video output
  • HDMI 2.0 port up to 4Kp60
  • VGA port up to Full HD resolution
• audio
  • 3.5mm audio jack (headphones + mic)
  • Built-in speaker(s) and microphone
  • Digital audio via HDMI
• Networking
  • 1 Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port
  • Dual-band 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE
• Keyboard – 78-key QWERTY keyboard
• USB – 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port
• Extension – 26 pin GPIO header
• Power – 5V via Type-C port
• Dimensions – 286 x 122 x 22mm
• Weight – 385 grams

The product page in english has nothing on the software, but the A Chinese man indicates that Orange Pi 800 will ship with Chromium OS and include Scratch and Python tools by default, underlining the product’s educational focus. The company is apparently working on its own operating system as well as “Orange Pi OS” described as a lightweight operating system based on Arch Linux (Arm), and which will support all Orange Pi hardware, including Orange Pi 800.

It is not yet available for download, but you can find some additional details at Orange Pi website. I guess that’s good news although I’m a little surprised they didn’t go for a Debian or Ubuntu based system, especially since they already have a bunch of Armbian supported cards.

I don’t have information on the price and availability of the new keyboard computer, as I just found it on the company’s website. I would expect a launch in the next few days or weeks, and to be a viable alternative the Orange Pi 800 should be competitively priced against the Raspberry Pi 400 which launched for $70 but is now almost sold as part of a $100 kit with mouse, keyboard, cables and programming book.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 on a part-time basis, before stepping down as Director of Software Engineering and starting writing daily news and reviews full-time later in 2011.