The Flipper Zero is a remarkably versatile tool for hackers, DIYers and enthusiasts. Described as a portable multi-tool for geeks, it features a monochrome LCD screen, physical buttons, USB and Bluetooth functionality, GPIO pins, an infrared transceiver and much more. If you’re wondering what a Pinball Zero actually does, well, it’s complicated. But it’s hard to imagine this feature set being improved upon – at least, it was until the company unveiled the Flipper One. This new device is a parallel multi-tool with a unique and significantly updated design from the original. More powerful or not, the team wants you to think of it as adjacent, “with its own goals” rather than an iterative upgrade.
The biggest change for the Flipper One is a push toward networking and wireless protocols, with Gigabit Ethernet, USB Ethernet, and Wi-Fi 6E built in, as well as optional support for 5G with an M.2 modem connection. It’s also designed to be open, like Linux, so “you can build almost anything” on it. Of course, these upgrades require improved hardware performance, which the Flipper One delivers in spades. Starting with a high-performance eight-core Rockchip RK3576 SoC, it also has an integrated Mali G52 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NPU for LLM and AI models to run locally. Additionally, a low-power Raspberry Pi microcontroller unit will power the display, touchpad, lights and more.
In short, Flipper Zero is intended for “offline point-to-point access control protocols” and DIY related projects. Flipper One is aimed at “anything IP-connected” and it comes with enough hardware for “high-performance” Linux computing, SDR, and local AI tasks. From a visual standpoint, it also looks more aggressive, more cyberpunk, and frankly more functional.
