Now, many of you probably know that the Pi 2 was supposedly not going to be released until 2017. However, obviously, it came early.
When the Pi 2 was released, I got super geeked about it - I mean, it came early and it has amazing specs! Then, when I saw that Element14 was going to be doing a Road Test/giveaway for the Pi 2 - well, I just had to enter!
So, I set to work drafting up my qualifications to enter the contest and asked a few questions on the contest page. However, before I could actually get to submitting my entry, I received an email from element14Dave (Dave Hamblin) saying that, if I was interested (what a silly thing to say...,) they would send me a Raspberry Pi 2 because of my entry in the 'Tis the Season contest and my interest in the road test.
Obviously, I sent a hurried email back saying yes and supplying everything needed to secure my piece of Pi. (See what I did there? Eh? Eh? I really need to work on my jokes...) Then, I waited. And boy was it torture. I knew the package was coming, but I had no idea when.
Funnily enough, I had just shot Dave Hamblin an message asking him if he knew when it would arrive literally five minutes before it was dropped off. Up until then I had been telling myself I wasn't going to open it until I was doing the unboxing video I had planned. You can imagine how long that sentiment lasted.
I did manage to quell my desire enough so that I only took it out of the box & bag and looked at it (didn't flash the SD card or anything) before I did my unboxing video. But, as soon as the unboxing video was shot, I had Raspbian flashed and was taking her out for a spin.
Now, I'm afraid I haven't ever done anything particularly spectacular with the Raspberry Pi (though I certainly have plenty of spectacular ideas I want to try when I actually have money) and I don't have an incredibly spectacular writeup or video with graphs, charts, numbers, lasers, and unicorns looking the times and benchmarking prowess of the Pi 2, but what I have I submit to your judgment element14 community.
I, thus far, have created two videos looking at the Pi 2. The first is just a simple unboxing video, and the second a video in which I take a look at some boot times and application launch times.
Unboxing video:
and the boot/application times video:
I do plan on doing more in the future, but this is all I have so far. I know they aren't spectacular, but they're the best I was able to do. I hope I've proved myself and haven't messed up too badly on the Road Test (although this wasn't officially a Road Test.)
In my, admittedly minor, experiences with the Pi 2 it has been amazing. It starts up and shuts down faster, it runs everything faster, it can multi-task better ... it's just all around better. LibreOffice, which, although it ran on the original Raspberry Pis, often had serious input lag and made the CPU run at 100% constantly.
Epiphany/Web (the foundation's Pi-optimized browser) did very well for the hardware it was on, but still had issues.
Minecraft: Pi Edition ran quite well, except when you used the TNT sword python script and blew up about 50 pieces of TNT. That lags your game like there is no tomorrow. However, it still had its issues, and would occasionally lag if you were flying rapidly around your world.
The Pi 2 definitely handles all of those just fine, I never ran into any lag spikes and, personally, I think that the Pi 2 is all the more a computer that schools can use. It's capable of running average desktop applications that a student would need and it still has that incredible $35 price point.
I'm new to making videos, so I'm looking for feedback. Please leave me a comment on the video letting me know what you thought, what did & didn't like about the video & the Pi 2, and if you have any suggestions for future videos or stuff to do with the Pi 2.
Yeah, that's all I really have! Huge thank you Element14 for sending me the Pi 2, @element14Dave for putting up with my slow turnaround time on this post, and you, the community, for taking the time to look at what I've done!