Raspberry Pi has announced that its first batch of $35 computers will be finished manufacturing as of February 20th, and they will be airfreighted to the UK immediately after that; they should be available for purchase by the end of the month. It has also gotten Broadcom to make available a datasheet about the ARM peripherals in the Pi’s CPU chip—useful for those who want to port other operating systems to the device, or are just interested in the tech specs.

As I’ve said before, this device could be quite useful in education and for Internet access in places that don’t have a lot of money to spend on computers. I could see public libraries and Internet cafés offering banks of browser-equipped Pis for patron web browsing—assuming they become available in the kind of mass quantities you’d need to support institutional orders.

And, of course, they could be used for e-reading by people who have a TV but can’t afford any other computer equipment, even a tablet.

I look forward to their availability, and plan to order one myself as soon as I can.

(Found via Ars Technica.)

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