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6 Raspberry Pi Handhelds Worth Exploring (If You Have Money to Spend)
Ever since it first appeared as a credit card-sized computer, the Raspberry Pi has quietly reshaped how we think about cheap, hackable hardware. Its ability to run fully-fledged Linux distros and GPIO pins for wiring up sensors and motors all while being cheap is what drew people in.
Of course, recent hikes across its lineup have made things harder for tinkerers, but that's the price they have to pay for access to a well-established ecosystem.
That ecosystem covers a lot of ground too. Between the standard boards, the Zero line, and the Compute Modules meant to sit inside custom carrier boards, there is a Pi suited for nearly every kind of project.
Makers and small companies have leaned on this range to build all sorts of things, and some of the results barely look like the underlying device anymore.
With this list, we will be taking a look at a few handhelds that will make you wonder what more a Raspberry Pi can do.
The Hackberry Pi CM5 is an open source handheld built by Zitao, an engineering student at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany.
At the front sits a 4-inch 720x720 touchscreen, paired with a repurposed BlackBerry keyboard (Q10, Q20, or 9900 layouts), and the keys can be remapped through Vial if the default mapping does not suit you.
Powering it is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, running on a quad-core Cortex-A76 chip clocked at 2.4GHz, and a 5000mAh battery keeps it running for roughly five hours on standby or three to four hours of active use.
There are two ways to get one. Elecrow sells a barebones kit for $158 to $168, but you will need to source your own Compute Module 5 and put it together yourself. If you want it ready to use, Carbon Computers sells a fully assembled version starting at $449, with prices climbing to $1,049 for higher RAM and storage.
You will notice further on that most handhelds on this list trade the standard Raspberry Pi board for a Compute Module to save space. The PocketTerm35 is Waveshare's pocketable Linux terminal, built around a full Raspberry Pi 4B or Pi 5.