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

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.

The basic Pine 64 is priced at just $15 (around £10, or AU$20) plus shipping and it boasts a 64-bit ARM A53 quad-core CPU running at 1.2GHz, with Mali 400-MP2 graphics and 512MB of DDR3 system memory.

As far as connectivity goes, you get two USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, and HDMI – this little board is capable of piping out 4K video. There's also a 3.5mm stereo output mini-jack and a microSD slot into the bargain.

The recommended operating systems for the board are Android (Lollipop) and Linux (Ubuntu).

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.

• Also check out: What's the best Raspberry Pi for your needs?