Pine 64 is Raspberry Pi 3 that does 4K, but you'll have to wait to get one

Pine 64

Forget fruit, wood is where it's at when it comes to miniature computing – or at least that's what the makers of the Pine 64 would have us believe, a rivalling board that undercuts the Raspberry Pi 3.

The Pine 64 is now shipping to those who backed the project on Kickstarter, and it has specs in the same ballpark as the Pi 3.

In serious demand

However, the bad news is that this cheapest variant is sold out, with no indication of when it might be available to order again. Indeed, Kickstarter backers who have pre-ordered are only getting their devices slowly, as PC World spotted, and some have taken to forums to air their displeasure.

The makers have been accused of poor communication in some respects, and some of the complainers aren't happy that ordering complementing accessories seems to have pushed the delivery of their board back, and they weren't informed of this fact.

The more expensive variants of the device, which add extra ports and more system RAM, are still currently available to order, but the makers warn that they may not ship until May.

The Pine 64+ with 1GB of RAM is $19 (around £13, or AU$25), and the Pine 64+ 2GB, which doubles up that memory again and adds Wi-Fi, runs to $29 (around £20, or AU$38), with global shipping being $12 (around £8, or AU$16) on top of that.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).