The Orange Pi 800 looks like a keyboard at first glance, but it’s so much more. A complete all-in-one computer that uses this form factor to make installation as easy as possible, as you only need to connect a display to it.

The company behind Orange Pi has been manufacturing alternatives to Raspberry Pi single-board minicomputers for years. Now the company has unveiled the answer to the Raspberry Pi 400. Like it, it’s a solution that removes components and cables from the desktop and greatly simplifies installation, configuration and commissioning less technical users or those who do not want to poke too much.

OrangePi800

That must be said stuffing a computer into a keyboard is nothing new and the modern computer age, beyond «PC»From IBM, started with similar form factors such as Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum or Atari 800XL.

Like the Raspberry solution, the Orange Pi 800 has a design and dimensions similar to a compact keyboard. It has 78 keys, some status LEDs and dimensions 286 x 122 x 22 mm at a weight of 385 grams.

It has a plaque inside ARM with Rockchip RK3399 processor (two Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores) and Mali-T860 graphics. It is a low-power processor with several years behind it, but in return it has a relatively solid software ecosystem. It is complemented by 4 GB of LPDDR4 memory and 64 GB of eMMC flash storage.

Among the elements of connectivity we can mention:

• 1 HDMI 2.0 port
• 1 VGA port
• 1 x 3.5 mm microphone / headphone jack
• 1 gigabit Ethernet port
• 2 USB 3.0 type A ports
• 1 USB 2.0 type A port
• 1 USB Type-C port (for power)
• 1 microSD card reader
• WiFi 5
• Bluetooth 5.0 LTE
• built-in speaker
• 26-pin GPIO header

The Orange Pi 800 will support Chromium OS (the open version of the Google Chrome OS operating system) as well as the new Orange Pi operating system based on Arch Linux. No price was revealed, but given that it will compete with the Raspberry PC-keyboard and that it has a price $ 70the shots should point there.