“excellent small computer”

Posted 8 years ago

“Although I have had the pi3 for less than a month this is going to be a long review. Let me first make clear that so far I have only used the standard Raspbian distribution. I have not had time to experiment with other distributions or operating systems. I already owned a pi from some time ago and I knew its limitations so first thing was to see if it could serve as a desktop replacement. This means three things. Email, web browsing and some word processing. As far as email goes, the results were excellent. The claws client is fast, responsive and functional. In fact, I liked its simplicity so much that I installed it on my usual laptop and use it instead of thunderbird. Word processing with liber office was ok but I have to confess I did not give it anything too demanding to do. The lightweight browsers that came with Raspbian were not really cutting the mustard (sooner or later you get on something they can not handle) so I decided to install Firefox (iceweasel) to see how it would cope. With a lot of patience, it can get by but frankly maybe one should wait for the next pi version to claim that it can serve as a proper desktop replacement. The usual task of the original pi was to run wolfram scripts (mathematica). This was nothing sort of miraculous. It works and it is not slow. It is still better with command line but it is now fast and functional and even using the Mathematica gui works if you really want to do so. In addition, since there is an inbuilt wireless card, I set it up as an access point for my home network. Fantastic with all laptops, some annoying lag with an Amazon fire stick ( the jury is still out on whether it is the pi or the stick that causes it) and fine with YouTube on a Sony smart TV. All that while it runs wolfram scripts at the same time. You do not need a powered USB hub for a wifi dongle. It is on board and the range is decent! Finally, I found a rather novel use. I write scripts that use more than one language (Rscript with Python and bash wrappers). Checking the efficiency of coding improvements on fast computers is not easy as it is hard to accurately measure execution time. The relative (but not excessive like its ancestor) slowness of the pi3 means that any execution time coding improvements are visible to the naked eye so as to speak. You just need a timer. You can see your improvements work in real time. The pi3 also cooperates with 64GB SD cards so you can even use it to back up your files. As I said, I have not had time to experiment with anything other than Raspbian. When I find some time, I will get another SD card and experiment with something else. I think that so far it has proved its worth in less than 4 weeks.”

Helpful Report

Posted 8 years ago

“I was happy to get this. The only thing I was surprised to not get it in box that I had seen online but simply in bubble bag. Everything works except I have not tried the blutooth. Wifi works well as well as the Ethernet.”

Helpful Report

Posted 8 years ago

“As usual fast delivery. Eagerly awaited and got it working in no time. Wifi took a few more minutes to get going. Excellent.”

Helpful Report

Posted 8 years ago

“Having a stable of very early B version Pi's in various roles around the house, (Aquarium Monitor; Internet Radio and KODI media player) I'd been concentrating on them doing something, not sitting in drawers. I saw a Pi-2 for the first time whilst visiting the grandsons and decided to upgrade - and then the Pi-3 appears out of no-where! (OK, I know it took years to develop) First impressions, from a standing start:- Very impressive. significantly faster than the Pi-2. WiFi very easy to set up - Bluetooth is a little more tricky but getting better. It certainly found my Sony Ericsson Bluetooth speaker with a little fiddling. The USB hub is now relegated to the just-in-case pile as four onboard USB ports plus WiFi and Bluetooth is enough for anyone, right? ;-) The Pi-3 is usable as a desktop machine by all but the most hard-core or fastidious user, it is now my desktop development machine - the one I use to try out ideas before embedding the components and software into one of the other Pi's. Perhaps there should be a Pi-3 challenge?:- Use a Pi-3 as your desktop machine exclusively for a week - and see what you can and can't do with it in real life. It just gets better and better as the OS is fine-tuned... SP PS: Get the 2.5 Amp power supply if you're going to push the USB ports.”

Helpful Report

Posted 8 years ago

“Works great (as expected). The additional computing power allows to decode up to 720p HEVC videos (high bitrates might be a bit of a problem). However: you REALLY NEED a heat sink. Without it the core will quickly reach 80C and clock down from 1.2 GHz to 0.6 and be slower than the old RPi2”

Helpful Report

Posted 8 years ago

“Service was simple and fast. Got my order even faster than it was said. Nice!”

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Reviews