“This is such a fabulous little beast. Mine is now running PiCorePlayer and is sitting on the top of our house HiFi stack streaming music delivered over the Pi's built in WiFi to my AV amp using an HDMI cable while displaying album art and other music info in the TV.”
“Massive, massive improvement over the Pi Zero. Essentially a 3B, it's so much more capable than the original. Highly recommended, if you can get one.”
“The original Pi Zero W is a great little computer for a variety of projects, but for use as a basic desktop computer it really isn't powerful enough. The Pi Zero 2 W is another thing entirely with faster boot times and, in some simple benchmarks I've done, nearly 3 times as much computing power in general use. This extra computing power means you can play higher resolution videos and perform tasks such as video encoding or compiling software much faster. I've not tested how much faster the Pi Zero 2 W is at 3D graphics, but I imagine there will be a significant improvement over the original Pi Zero W.
For use as a retro gaming device it represents a big improvement over the original Pi Zero W. Whereas the Pi Zero W struggled with some Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64 games the Pi Zero 2 W handles them much better and makes all the ones I've tried very playable. With the Pi Zero 2 W, for around £40 (including case, cables, microSD card and a cheap controller) you can get a nice little emulation machine. Well, at least that's how much I paid for all the parts.
Overall, I highly recommend the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.
One last note is that included in the Raspberry Pi Operating System is a variety of programming tools and a load of books about programming and various Pi related electronic projects. I've not explored these in detail, but on the surface it looks like this would be a good, affordably priced, place to start if you wanted to learn programming, both for children and adults.”
“Definitely does what it says. Enough power to be a self-contained timelapse camera (see https://www.npmjs.com/package/pi-obscura), and with the correct setup, it runs well. It might be easier to develop on a meatier Pi and deploy to the Zero 2 as, for example, running a VSCode server pretty much saturates it.”
