Immediately went to buy, and I'm really not clear on what I should be buying. There are three different varieties and it's hard to tell what the differences are.
RPI-CM4 Lite: Raspberry Pi CM4 104000 lite (ARM Cortex-A72 quad-core, 4GB LPDDR4, WIFI 2.4 GHz, 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/ac wireless + Bluetooth 5.0, BLE)
A-06: A-06 Core module (ARM64-bit Dual-core Cortex-A72 + Quad-core Cortex-A53, Mali-T864, 4GB LPDDR4)
A-04: A-04 Core module (ARM64-bit Quad-core Cortex-A53, Mali-T720, 2GB DDR3)
R-01: R-01 Core module (RISC-V 64bit Single-core RV64IMAFDCVU @ 1.0GHz, No GPU, 1GB DDR3)
RPI-CM4 Lite: Broadcom BCM2711
A-06: Rockchip RK3399
A-04: Allwinner H6
R-01: Allwinner D1
Some of them require an adapter that you have to purchase separately.
Still don't know what the best board is for my use case. I would like to have a dumbed down environment which is optimized for this handheld format and lets me start some editors and fantasy consoles from a menu.
Yes to that adding some instant on/off/hybernate . Would be great to capture ideas when they come and not wait for the thing to boot and make other decisions. Something like a dedicated device but configurable for other tasks.
(It's possible through a different hardware design to support a secondary, slower sd card interface for an emmc cm4 via the SDHOST peripheral connected to some GPIO pins, but the pi cant boot from it)