Argon One Up

The dream of a Raspberry Pi laptop is realised at last, with a bunch of great features if not a bargain price

- LES POUNDER

Argon 40 is a well-known name in the world of Raspberry Pi upgrades and cases, but the One Up is more creative and ambitious than any accessory we've seen: it's a fully functional, bona fide Raspberry Pi laptop.

It's based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, and offers an M.2 slot for PCIe storage. It's being funded via Kickstarter, with the price set at around £450 for the Core unit with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD, plus a GPIO breakout box, which we'll talk about below. I tried a pre-production unit, so the final version may have a slightly different finish and hopefully a few software tweaks, but there's more than enough here to get the idea.

Despite the low price, the One Up feels like a serious laptop. The cool, metallic, slate-grey finish is fingerprint-resistant, and the thin chassis feels good in the hand. The chiclet keyboard works well for this format, with a smart Raspberry Pi logo in place of the Windows key and a welcome UK layout option. The trackpad is serviceable and feels suitably responsive, accepting either a tap or a click for mouse clicks.