Back in 1994, I spent my first post-university pay packet on an Acorn A3010 with a whopping 20MB hard drive and the Learning Curve software pack. It wasn’t my first computer, but it was what I felt was my first “real” one. In the past, I’d had an Acorn Electron, an Amiga A500, and, to see me through University, an Amstrad PPC512. Despite their clear differences, all of these machines had one simple thing in common – they were based around and set in an oversized keyboard.

I broke the chain in 1996 with a RiscPC – because I couldn’t resist the lure of a £99 StrongARM card. But, with the announcement from the Raspberry Pi Foundation of the Pi400, I briefly came back to the keyboard fold.

When the package was pushed through the letter box, I eagerly tore at the outer packing to reveal a crisp box, in full Raspberry Pi red and white livery, with detailed end panels depicting the delights inside. I could see the ports without opening the box. Like many others I suspect (and anecdotal evidence on Twitter tells me so), this was as far as I got for thirty seconds while I worked out how to open the thing. I fumbled for lips, hinges and lift up panels until I finally realised it was a sleeve hiding a neat but ordinary box inside!

Once inside, the diminutive machine was a beauty to behold. Small, simple, precise. As I’d bought the computer alone, for the princely sum of £66.90, there was nothing else in there. I had almost everything else I needed all ready and waiting. The one thing I didn’t have was a working ROOL ROM. But thanks to Chris Gransden and David Pitt on the RISCOSopen Forum, I had modified one to let it boot from a USB drive instead (the SDIODriver wasn’t working at the time).

I plugged everything in and fired up the little machine and it burst into life. RISC OS on a new A30x0 (I’m sure people have comparisons to other early computers, but I’m sticking with my A3010!). I used it to do the usual tasks, configured things, messed about and then decided I ought to start again. This is where I lost my way with the Pi400 a little, if not purely from a RISC OS perspective.

Reaching for Ctrl Break can’t be done out of the box. There is no Break Key. On other small keyboards, Pause is often the new name for Break. So, Ctrl-Fn-Pause has become something in my muscle memory. But there is no Pause key either. KeyMapper is the obvious solution, but the keyboard is so compact, and the keys so reduced in number, it’s even difficult to find something to map it to. The best option seems to be PrtScn. However, in standard RISC OS keypresses, this serves as Print and fires up the Print dialogue. As I rarely print from RISC OS these days, it was “do-able” but for those users who regularly print directly from RISC OS, this may be problematic and may take some getting used to.

The second issue, from a purely RISC OS perspective, is the lack of a dedicated F12 key. It can be achieved by pressing Fn-F2, but the common RISC OS keypress of Ctrl-Shift-F12, spread out over the keyboard, now becomes a very cramped Ctrl-Shift-Fn-F2, all on the very left hand side and difficult to access without looking (for me, anyway).

In the past, either of these “omissions” has been sufficient to put me off buying a standalone keyboard for RISC OS, but on the Pi400 both exist. If it hadn’t been for the built in computer, and the bargain price, I would ordinarily have skipped. I knew about these shortcomings prior to purchase, but I wanted, wished, it would be okay and I’d just get by.

For true portability with the Pi in general, Elesar’s WIFI HAT, and to a degree, RISCOSbits very own WispyV, have become very useful for accessing wireless networks. Whilst the Pi400 plays nicely with both of these, it does have issues. The GPIO port on the Pi400 could have been better placed, in my opinion. That said, I’m not sure where, just not there! Plugging in a WIFI HAT (or any other HAT, I suppose) leaves a very exposed PCB poking upwards from the rear of the Pi400, begging to be bumped, dislodged or, worse still, broken. It looks similar to the ROM packs and add-ons on computers of old, but feels more fragile and prone to damage. Trying a variety of right angle header adaptors, the shape and size of the HAT, and especially the two EEPROM pins means it either raises the keyboard from the surface or hangs over the keyboard. Neither of them particularly satisfactory. A short ribbon cable extender is useful to create a “dongle” whereby the HAT can sit nicely on the desk. People may remember the Dongle Dangles that held onto ArtWorks and Impression dongles at the back of the desk! In all, the Pi400 becomes “clunky” at that point. Not unmanageably so, but clunky nonetheless.
The WispyV, similarly, has its issues in this respect. Once connected to the ethernet port and USB port (for power), with a mouse connected, that leaves the end user with a single USB port. Obviously, USB hubs are commonplace, but with the WispyV hanging from the back with a USB Hub hanging alongside it, again, it becomes “clunky”.

Now, the less-RISC OS specific bits, but some of them are specific to me – you may have a different view.

The keyboard. Personally, I am not a fan of the keyboard. There isn’t much travel, and I don’t “feel” the keyboard well. I need a bit more travel. I use a number of smaller “chiclet” keyboards and laptop keyboards on a regular basis, but they all “feel” better than this. To me. I suspect some others will sit in the same camp as me, whereas others have commented on how “decent” it feels in use. So, this is a personal comment rather than a criticism. After all, some people were okay with the ZX keyboards!

The Pi400 itself, with an external keyboard (which kind of defeats the point!), is a very nice machine. With the same internal gubbins as a Pi 4, albeit stretched out, it flies with RISC OS. It’s also “overclocked” out of the box, running at 1.8GHz, as opposed to the standard 1.5GHz of the Pi 4. In addition, it comes with 4GB RAM, which is nice, but hardly a “big thing” for the memory-frugal RISC OS systems. Most users will struggle to use 2GB, let alone 4GB. Apart from using an unseen USB 2.0 port to control that keyboard internally, the IO ports are the same as the Pi 4 – 2 external USB 3.0 ports, 1 external USB 2.0 port (plus the internal keyboard connector), an Gigabit ethernet port, two micro-HDMI ports, a micro SD card slot, and that GPIO port. It also has the same USB-C port for powering the machine, although I haven’t checked if this can be used as an extra USB hub, like on the Pi 4.

The case itself contains a rather large metal heatsink that dissipates the heat from the CPU very nicely, mainly by running the length of the machine! Thrashing the machine with, say, Iris or an emulator running full pelt, doesn’t sufficiently warm the machine or the CPU to cause any concern. It’s an excellent bit of thermal engineering (from a non-engineer’s perspective) for a £67 computer. Even overclocking it to 2.2GHz doesn’t really push the temperature up beyond around 40C.

Given that the Pi 4 with 4GB RAM can be had for around £55 and one of those industrial strength heatsink cases is about £12, it could be considered that the keyboard is effectively free. I don’t like the keyboard, but it’s effectively “for nowt” so I can live with it (but see below)!

The machine feels sturdy and well-built – it doesn’t feel like a cheap plasticky keyboard. This is due, in no small part, to that heatsink which I would imagine adds quite a bit of weight and substance. It does feel like you could drop it from a fair height and it would be okay, unless you were particularly unlucky (don’t try this at home, folks!).

Part of me wants to take it apart and see what could be done with the new form factor board, as wide as it is. As an esteemed editor privately pointed out to me, it could be the basis of a Pi-Top laptop successor? That’s a tempting thought. I might even be happy with the keyboard in that scenario.

Overall, if you don’t want wireless network access, it is a nice portable machine. Not in the laptop sense, but in an “easy to carry” sense. The Pi Hut do a rather natty felt case for the Pi400, for only a fiver, which is worth a punt. Having bought one myself, it’s functional and pleasant, and allows me to carry my Pi400 around, hidden, if I need to.

That said, I’m going back to that keyboard. It’s a bit of a showstopper for me. Maybe only me though. I do have a use for a fast and portable Pi, and the Pi400 could fill that gap, but most of the places I need to take a Pi, for RISC OS use, will have a keyboard and a mouse I can hook up. For that reason, after a few weeks of usage, it has been largely superseded by a small “desktop” machine.

But I can see the Pi400 selling like hotcakes within the RISC OS market. For those who want portability, for those who want a cheap machine to play with, for those who want one for their kids for Christmas, this is a no-brainer. Now, if only it had the 20MB of built in storage and a new Learning Curve pack that my A3010 came with…