July 2020 may seem like a lifetime ago, but for a Kickstarter, it's a mere drop in the ocean. Back then, CutiePi was seeking crowdfunding for its Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 powered tablet. This model is almost ready to ship to eager backers, but in a recent update to their site, we see that the company is now working on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4-powered unit.
The Compute Module 4 CutiePi tablet looks almost identical to its predecessor. The majority of the changes are internal and based around the new carrier board for the included Compute Module 4 Lite with 2GB of RAM and a quad-core 1.5 GHz Arm CPU. You may be thinking, "Why can't they just insert a Compute Module 4 in the old units?" With the Compute Module 4, we saw a move away from the SODIMM form factor used for previous modules. The Compute Module 4 uses two densely packed connectors for data and power connections. Other changes introduced by CutiePi 2.0 are a microphone (replacing the six-pin GPIO), 2.4 and 5 GHz WiFi, and Bluetooth 5 / BLE.
What remains the same is the 1280 x 800 8 inches 5 point multi-touch IPS LCD. That's enough for on-the-go projects, but should we need to use CutiePi on the desk, we can plug in an external monitor via a micro HDMI output. CutiePi features a 5 MP rear-facing camera and a gyroscope sensor that's used to orientate the screen from portrait to landscape. As this is a tablet, CutiePi has its own user interface on top of a typical Raspberry Pi OS install.
The price for all of this? $199, which isn't a bad deal considering what we get. This time CutiePi is taking pre-orders directly on its website with a July 2021 shipping date.
