Raspberry Pi 2: First Impressions
I already had 3 Raspberry Pis so you might think it’s ridiculous to get excited for a 4th one but you would be wrong! Because this time they revised the hardware and made major upgrades.
The new Pi is rocking a quad-core Cortex A7 processor and it comes with 1GB memory. Rest of the specs remained the same (including the price!) but the processor and memory made a huge impact.
For more detailed comparison check the benchmark results on the official website
I tried using a web browser in the old versions and it was painfully slow. So I decided to use the previous versions for background tasks like a security camera or network scanning. The B+ is powerful enough to run XBMC and play videos but even that is slow when it transitions between different screens. So seeing the new Pi can be a full desktop replacement is really exciting.
What else is new
Pi 2 comes with a few applications installed like Mathematica and Wolfram, utilities like a PDF reader and text editor and even Minecraft!
What’s next
I don’t have a project in mind at the moment for this one yet. Since the architecture has breaking changes a lot of existing OS versions don’t work on it yet like Raspbmc and Kali Linux. Maybe I can wait and install Kali Linux on it and practice some security features. Or hopefully Microsoft releases Windows 10 for IoT soon enough so I can play with it. I’ll keep posting as I find more about my new toy! In the meantime I’m open to all project ideas so please leave a comment if you anything in mind!