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maybe microsoft found pandoras source code

Anyone can. The Pandora handheld computer runs a GPLv2 licensed Linux operating system.

However the one problem with playing retro games on a big HD wide screen TV is they look extra terrible.

Then the emulator needs to simulate the electron beam spread of an SDTV, on which bright scanlines spread more than dark scanlines. I'm pretty sure that that's doable in a pixel shader. Or the emulator needs to use Scale2x or hq3x or something to smooth borders of things, which ends up making 8-bit game graphics look like cartoony Flash vector graphics. Scale2x has also been implemented in a pixel shader.

The one problem I have with the Android Market place is that it is very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff if you will.

And Nintendo Power used to say good things about every licensed NES game. Aren't there other sources of reviews of Android games?

Or look at the sordid tale of Open Pandora. Too bad Kickstarter wasn't around when they got started.

This is to stop situations like the Pandora console, who's developers lied through their teeth about how ready they were to ship, took thousands of pre-orders, ran out of money, and now only ship 4 year old pre-orders when new ones are placed to cover the costs.

While there are a lot of great ideas, there are an equal number of total morons who don't know how to scale up production when their idea takes off.

It would be great if Kickstarter had a middle ground. People without any prototypes should be able to get support, but it needs to be made very clear to the supporters that any promises of product are very weak ones.

I have a Vita, it's a nice piece of kit, lack of games is a bit of a concern, I've had mine for months yet only 3 games so far. It doesn't help that when on the tube (London Underground) you're lucky to be in a position where you have both hands free. I prefer reading on my kindle, least you're certain to have one hand free during rush hour!

Now portable wise it's the 1Ghz Pandora that I should be receiving next week. Generally it seems qemu is able to emulate roughly a 75Mhz Pentium on there. Just hope that Master of Orion 2 is playable on the move. Oh and I'm not trying to sell one to you (I'm not affiliated in anyway), you should really check it out;

http://www.openpandora.org/index.php

Granted, these guys didn't have Kickstarter available when they first began work on this project. Granted, development of each release has been agonizingly slow. But if you're looking for a small, open console that plays a bunch of games, why buy Ouya when this is out there? Seriously. If these guys ever get serious dough rolling in, the price on these would drop through the floor now that all the sunk costs have been paid for. I want one. Now. It's definitely high on my list to buy once we get our debt paid down.

why not check out one of these? http://openpandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=91&Itemid=6&lang=en Angstrom Linux, and only 335 grams with a 10 hour battery, touch screen, gaming controls, keyboard, usb etc...

You could be over-analyzing the problem.

Since your requirements are quite specific (FOSS *nix OS + Editor) I suggest you go for a netbook. Don't under estimate the hassle with various devices. A single device is easyer to handle in cramped situations and you have less small parts that you can lose.

If you are travelling a lot your main concern will be universal power supply/recharging and battery time - aside from weight, which you mentioned already. It's for this reason you should consider a custom configuration of an android netbook or a tablet with attachable KB. I'm thinking about the Asus EEE Transformer Prime or a simular thing. If you can get some hacked version of Android running on there or maybe even a special linux build you're all set. It costs 500 Euros and has 15hrs of battery time. That's what I'd expect of a devbox for travelling. The further upside of the android tablet/netbook hybrids is that you can charge them with regular USB power which means you could theoretically save the wallwart/power supply.

An alternative would be some thin low-power lightweight netbook like the Asus EEE X101 and an extra battery pack for extended battery time. Maybe some off-the-beaten-track solution like the Pandora Open Gaming device with some Linux on it or so is what you'd like - after all the one shown behind the link is running Linux with XFCE ... sounds good to me. Definitely also take a look at those expert devices. With most of them you'll probably get the USB power advantage aswell - if they are 'low power' enough that is.

Bottom line: Put your efforts into customizing the netbook / android device option and don't fiddle with microprojectors and such. AFAICT they are to much of fiddling and simply not ready for primetime yet.

My 2 cents.

http://openpandora.org/

Seems to have everything you want, the 1ghz version is a little pricey and not available right away so maybe this suggestion wasn't all that good. Highly recommended though.

Here's the thread on debian-arm: http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2011/12/msg00008.html and the corresponding one on arm-netbook: http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2011-December/thread.html

The problem that's been made clear time and time again is that if you want low-cost mass-produced hardware, you normally have to go with GPL-violating products (see list here http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/android_tablets/) and that means that you will spend the majority of your time reverse-engineering the product for anything between two weeks and two years, depending on luck and skill, before getting something useful. By the time you're done, the product is usually end-of-lifed: thus if it breaks, you're back to square one.

The reason for the GPL violations is that the low-cost China-based Factories simply have zero software skills: they're provided with binary-only firmware from an ODM who themselves usually had to sign an NDA from the SoC manufacturer, itself in direct violation of the GPL, in order to get access to the source code. Normally there's a chain of at least *five* companies with whom you have to negotiate with for several days or weeks - each - in order to explain the situation to them, against a precarious balance of them basically not giving a stuff because there's no financial incentive for them to give you anything at all: they're already making money, selling product, so why should they care?

thus, we logically concluded that the only way to get non-GPL-violating product out there is to go directly to the factories and be the supplier of their software.

so for the past two years i've been contacting and vetting China-based factories, directly, to find at least one which is prepared to work with us (RH Technology - http://www.rh-technology.com./ the basis of the deal is, "we won't charge you for software expertise if you won't charge us for hardware design costs", and after two years we finally found _one_ factory willing to do a deal, and are looking for more.

we've also found an absolutely great CPU, called the Allwinner A10, which in mass-volume quantities is only about $7: that means that a PCB similar to the raspberrypi with similar features can be made for about $15 (not $25) and, because the Allwinner CPU is an ARM Cortex A8 not an ARM11 it is at least three times quicker than the raspberrypi's CPU.

now we have at least 15 Debian Developers who are willing to support the project by buying beta hardware samples, and we're looking for more people to help support this effort, by committing to buy product (just like with the OpenPandora http://openpandora.org./ we have set up a CIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_interest_company) because it's a better vehicle than a non-profit, charity or profit-maximising company. the CIC is called Rhombus Tech - http://rhombus-tech.net./

we also have the full support of the Board of Directors of the Allwinner CPU: they released full source code to us in advance. we've made it available and found it to compile successfully.

in-advance GPL-compliant hardware really is very very unusual. even USA-based companies typically release GPL source code on or after the day that a product is announced. Archos for example made a tablet that used the Telechips TCC8900 series of CPUs, and complied with the GPL (in direct violation of the standard NDA available at the time from the SoC manufacturer!).

other than that: about the only existing product on the market that i can really recommend to you is the alwaysinnovating touchbook: http://alwaysinnovating.com/ - it's about $300.

Pandora has been released already, it's in production for US$500/EU440.

This would be a complete 180 on what the production team have been claiming, so (as in "investor") I would be very interested to hear if you have a citation for that.

Changing supplier and threatening legal action:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/4058-wifi-tests-and-circuitco-2011-06-17/page__view__findpost__p__74759

Oxidisation problems:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/4058-wifi-tests-and-circuitco-2011-06-17/page__view__findpost__p__74948

This would be a complete 180 on what the production team have been claiming, so (as in "investor") I would be very interested to hear if you have a citation for that.

Changing supplier and threatening legal action:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/4058-wifi-tests-and-circuitco-2011-06-17/page__view__findpost__p__74759

Oxidisation problems:

http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/4058-wifi-tests-and-circuitco-2011-06-17/page__view__findpost__p__74948

Uzebox is cool!

While on the subject, I'd also like to point out some other projects I've found interesting:

OpenPandora, a community-designed, Linux-running handheld. The specs are pretty impressive, by today's standards, but were even more impressive when it was first introduced. Best thing is, they're now manufacturing and shipping!

For those who like to tinker themselves, there is the BeagleBoard, a cheap (as they come) single board computer with impressive specs, designed for open source software. The Wikipedia article lists a number of alternatives, some of which may be more powerful and/or cheaper.

One interesting alternative to the BeagleBoard is the Hawkboard, which is backed by its own community. It's slightly less powerful than the BeagleBoard, but, at 89 USD, also costs quite a bit less.

And then there's the ever-popular Arduino, which comes in several varieties. You can buy them assembled starting at about 20 USD, or build your own for under 10 USD. They can be extended with "shields", e.g. to get extra I/O capabilities. Pretty cool stuff!

Personally, I am still tinkering around with resistors and transistors and the like, designing and simulating circuits with Qucs (which I feel is a lot more production-ready than that website suggests) and my Nokia N900, but any of the above hardware looks like it might be a nice next step up.

When you get XWindows and Gnome/KDE to run efficiently on ARM, you let me know and THEN we'll talk about portability

Heh... You mean, with this?

Maemo.

Or, perhaps, you mean with this:

Meego

Or even further...

OpenPandora

The only thing that Android has over those is that the mobile companies got behind it FIRST. Nothing else. XWindows isn't the problem. Hell, even GNOME/KDE isn't really the problem, especially with the class of resources you'll find with most of the ARM devices you're finding in the handhelds or tablets. It's only a sort-of problem with something that has 128MiB of RAM and then only sort-of.

Putting it simply, you haven't a clue about what you're talking about if you're basing this all on what you just tried to run up the flagpole here.

I mean the pandora is horribly, horribly expensive. 500 dollars just to have four knobs, a keyboard, and a machine that does nothing but play games ? ( no wonder they don't show the price on the homepage )

I'd rather have an Xperia Play. It's cheaper (not a lot, though), better games, it plays PSX and N64 ! Plays legacy games and emulators just fine, and it's also a phone, so you always have it on you. To idiots (say, your boss) it looks like a phone and thus can be brought anywhere without people getting their knickers in a twist.

It has cheap (or even free) emulators for everything including the old sierra games (discworld on android ! Hurray !), ... even dosbox !

Sounds more like the Pandora than the GP2x.

Even if their app store takes off, it's still going to be the same rinky-dink app-store style games you see on phones, plus emulators. And with such a small market base, I can't see many serious developers writing for it, so, at best, you can expect the usual ports and half-assed clones of popular IOS/Android games.

The OpenPandora's stuff is mostly on http://repo.openpandora.org/ now. It seems to coordinate the other places.

Granted, I don't see how anyone can play [S]NES on a touch screen (I've tried), but $500 is too steep for a [S]NES emulator. So you come up with a smartphone without the phone, and a game system without the games. Thus going back to my original point: it's over-engineered and crazy expensive, it's putting itself up against smartphones AND the big-name game consoles, and it doesn't dazzle on either front. It's not price-competitive, not power or feature competitive.

I'm not saying it's not a cool idea, or even that I wouldn't love having one to play with, but not at $500. I can't say how far above the "Sweet spot" (price/volume intersection) they are, but I can say for certain that the price alone cost them 1 sale. I'd not even be put off by a 3-month wait at a more sensible price.

To be fair, there are issues with the Pandora, but it's still pretty damn cool.

There are a couple of interesting games that are somewhat Pandora specific (like Super Geometry Dust), but as usual it's mostly fantastic for emulators where you've got

SNES
Sega Megadrive (Americans call it the Sega Genesis)
MAME
ScummVM
Residual (Grim Fandango)

Which are all pretty much spot on

Then you have some more work in progress ones, like

Playstation (playable enough for FF7 but some annoying lag in places)
Amiga (ugly UI to select stuff)
N64 (playable for Mario 64, but it's not ideal)

And probably a couple of others that I've completely forgotten.

I'm hoping that the UI improves as well - something like meego would absolutely rock, and it should work quite well

Maybe I'll get this once I actually receive my Pandora, though this only costs 1/25 the amount...

I'm actually working on a project right now that would be perfect for this thing. I was actually making it for the Pandora but since it's inherently a fairly low-tech title it should work on this thing just fine.

Doubtful, unless you're talking about selling huge quantities. In small quantities you end up being bumped to the back of all lines and end up paying more for most components than you otherwise would pay. Other than the price, Open Pandora does all the other things you're asking for. Admittedly, I've been waiting for mine for ages, but it does offer the things that you're asking for in a form factor that's easily hand held.

Perhaps you should check out the Pandora project. There have been concerns about it being vaporware in the past, but they've been producing about 250 per week for the last two months, and I don't know of any other pocket-sized device with openly developed first-party firmware that is still around (please reply with examples that contradict this, I would appreciate them). For $500 you can order one that would be shipped to you 7 days after you order, and you'd have an easier time compiling Linux-based software on that than an Android phone.

The other option for Nintendo would have been to tack on a laptop style battery which wouldn't work for a portable game system.

Except that this: http://www.openpandora.org/ has a 4000 mAh battery yet is only slightly smaller than the original DS phat. And looks to have room for the second screen and controls if you remove the keyboard and associated hardware.

I was looking forward to the Atari Flashback Portable that sadly never materialized. I really don't have a need or desire for a high-powered latest-generation portable console, but retro portable gaming I would pay for.

What about the Pandora?

What can you do with it?

Pandora's app site

Emulators

Loads more apps, including emulators and games

FWIW, I'm going to give Sony a chance to sell me a PSP2/NGP/whatever, but I'm already looking at alternatives. I don't really need all the gyros and accelerometers and multitouch surfaces and GPS and whatnot, and I think those things will jack up the price a lot. What I really want is a portable system on which I can watch videos (the PSP was good enough at that for me) and play sports games (especially soccer) and shooters. And I want two thumbsticks for the shooters so the controls can be consistent. I hate switching between PSP shooters, because each one has its own control scheme with its own ways of getting around the lack of a second thumbstick, and I get confused.

I was looking forward to the Atari Flashback Portable that sadly never materialized. I really don't have a need or desire for a high-powered latest-generation portable console, but retro portable gaming I would pay for.

What about the Pandora?

What can you do with it?

Pandora's app site

Emulators

Loads more apps, including emulators and games

FWIW, I'm going to give Sony a chance to sell me a PSP2/NGP/whatever, but I'm already looking at alternatives. I don't really need all the gyros and accelerometers and multitouch surfaces and GPS and whatnot, and I think those things will jack up the price a lot. What I really want is a portable system on which I can watch videos (the PSP was good enough at that for me) and play sports games (especially soccer) and shooters. And I want two thumbsticks for the shooters so the controls can be consistent. I hate switching between PSP shooters, because each one has its own control scheme with its own ways of getting around the lack of a second thumbstick, and I get confused.

Yeah, the open pandora gaming system http://www.openpandora.org/ got blocked on e-bay for a while as a pirate system that could play imports. After some discussion the pandora people were able to get e-bay to understand it is simply a tiny linux laptop and has little more/less capability than any other computer being sold on e-bay...

So will we be forced to use a Pandora battery to "steal" our technology from Zeus yet again?

No, we will be forced to use a Pandora gaming PDA, provided they can make them fast enough (not likely).

Replace CPU with one bought from Digikey, Mouser, or other large part seller.

And then find that this CPU has not only a custom BGA pinout but also a GPU and other *thbridge-integrated components on the same die. So by that time, you could have bought yourself a BeagleBoard or reserved a Pandora PDA instead of modding an appliance.

These days the kids fire up Pandora

If they can get one. There's a waiting list for the second batch before the first batch is even fully manufactured.

My point being that in a decade hardcopy recording will certainly still be around, but they will be a specialty item for us Geezers to mumble about through our oatmeal.

Likewise, some genres of music are more popular with (relative) geezers than with teens and college students.

True, but there's already a handheld like that.

A Pandora.

This page suggests that there's a lead time of several months to buy the hardware.

And though Wikipedia has a list of games for the major video game consoles, its article about Pandora lacked such a list. Nor could I find a corresponding with Google games for pandora or list of pandora games. Google pandora release list turned up this list of a bunch of emulators (without any licensed ROMs) and source ports of M-rated first-person shooters developed by Id Software. Do you expect original games with production values comparable to those of well-known PSP games to be produced for the Pandora? Or do you expect people to buy one device exclusively for major-label games and a second device exclusively for indie games?

http://openpandora.org/

A Pandora.

I'm loving my Pandora. Good luck getting one now, though, orders are backed up for many months at the moment with no sign of catching up.

Regardless, they're the ONLY way to play homebrew on the DS.

Nintendo's flippant response might be as follows: "Of course you can run unsigned code on a DS: just duct-tape a PDA to it." In other words, switch to an Archos 5 or a Pandora.

You should look into the Pandora...

http://www.openpandora.org/

Guess you are looking for an openpandora then? http://openpandora.org/

The Zipit Z2 is easy to flash with Linux, has a MiniSD slot for additional storage, built in Wifi, Querty backlit keyboard, 320x240 screen, 312MHz ARM chip.

People making custom distros for it have already managed to cover all aspects of the machine's hardware... lid switch, backlight adjustments, etc... I bought mine on clearance at Target in October, and it's an adequate pocket Linux box for me while I wait for my Pandora. Here's a sampling of what people are doing with it:

http://zipit.rootnexus.org/
http://hunterdavis.com/archives/category/zipit-hacking
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/zipit-z2-hacking-userland-side-track
http://www.karosium.com/2009/07/zipit2-clock-email-twitter-monitor.html
http://www.openzipit.org/
http://www.hak5.org/?s=zipit&x=0&y=0

I'd also like to nominate A(dot)ngstrom and the Pandora, the most powerful portable gaming system (or, the most game-friendly portable full-featured computer) yet created. It should be out Real Soon Now. I'd say "Order yours today!" but I want them all to myself.

The Pandora box was open a long time ago

The box of Pandora isn't even packed, let alone shipped or opened.

You also need good amount of CPU and RAM. Websites and especially video streaming and flash games are quite heavy, and so are the heavily-ajaxied Google apps.

To be precise : Adobe's crappy flash plugin and most current Javascript *interpreters* require lots of processing power.
What I mean is that the current slowness of Flash and AJAX is mostly due to current software not being efficient enough.

But google has quite some budget to leverage - both in terms of cash and brain power - to tackle this problem.
Their effort on Chrome's (browser) flash JIT compiler show that this is actually their intent.
(Similar as other work in other browsers. It seems that every browser conceptor is currently trying to make Javascript less CPU-power hungry).

Now if Google also could use their resource to bring a decent open source Flash plugin that isn't a huge useless junk (For example: finishing to make Gnash compatible and making it efficient ?)

Nonetheless, there are current (closed, proprietary) implementations of flash already running on embed hardware, so it should be achievable by google.

Last but not least : CPU performance of ultra low power embed CPU is currently rising - The next generation of ARM Cortex A9 is supposed to provide dual cores for the same power envelope as current single core Cortex A8.
In addition to that, handheld and palmtop CPUs usually have some special purpose hardware in addition to the ARM CPU (usually some DSP/FPU and some PowerVR 2D/3Dcore) - so the most CPU intensive task - decompressing the video streams - could be done in hardware.

And like someone said, shown hardware had 32 GB SSD card, which isn't really dirt cheap either.

That's probably because it is the smallest SATA SSD that you can quickly buy nowadays. They just went for a quickly customised Netbook using off-the-shelf parts.

But keep in mind that Chrome OS is basically just a browser-as-a-GUI running over a simple graphic server on a linux kernel. A minimalist Linux distribution is pretty much enough.

I've personnally already managed to cram Linux installations on 4GB Compact Flash modules (you can plug them directly into a IDE connector given the proper cable. CF and 16bits PC-CARD are basically ATAPI with a miniature connector.)
You can find projects like Damn Small Linux which pack much more functionality on minimalistic LiveCDs. (On 50MB mini CD !)
As another example OpenMoko manages to cram quite a few linux tools into 256MiBytes images.

We're really far from the minimal 16GB requirement of Windows Vista and 7.

In theory you could run Chrome OS into something like a Pandora with a bigger screen. And could indeed jury-rig something like this using Beagle boards.
That means having a Chrome OS low-power machine build *today* out of *hobbyist* parts. Now think about the near future, with mass produced units.
By 5-10 years, as the GP wrote, it's entirely possible that you could find such hardware with a bigger screen and a slightly better CPU within reasonable costs.
Even earlier than that I think.

As I recall, the pandora handheld is also built on an OMAP3530 and has a video out jack. Video playback didn't work out so well for Sony's PSP, but having a HTPC in my pocket that can stream my videos over the network seems like a good thing.

If you're cool with dropping the 300 USD you could also get a Pandora (essentially what you described plus game controls, touchscreen, WLAN and Bluetooth in a clamshell roughly the size of a first-gen Nintendo DS). They're currently preparing for the first mass-production run and preorders for the second batch should start somewhere within the next to or three months.

If you're interested, check out http://openpandora.org/. If you're not, you could try to get in touch with the OP devs and find out where they source their screens - however, their source might not work for you as they might only sell in bulk.

Disclaimer: I'm not directly affiliated with OpenPandora but I did preorder a Pandora.

But what I've always really wanted in my pocket was a little debian box

If your local Target still has any, grab a Zipit Z2 (warning: horrible flash and music). My girlfriend got one on clearance for $12.50; I got one for $25... We're running Debian on one and Angstrom on the other currently. Check out this guy's tutorials. It's got a 312MHz ARM chip, wifi, querty keyboard, MiniSD slot, and a 320x240 color screen. I'm currently attempting to tune Angstrom to the point that I get all the stuff I had on my old Zaurus.

Also, you may want to check out the Pandora, which is nearing release. The unofficial blog has a lot of recent info. I was about to buy an N810 when my OQO died, but saw that the Pandora was getting less vapory and pre-ordered that instead.

Their status page looks pretty close.

Again?

If it ever ends up coming out.

Their status page looks pretty close. This thing actually sounds very cool, a sort of netbook (plus gaming hand held!) that a linux geek would be able to settle for. The type of thing that still works to lounge around in bed on a winter morning and just cruise the net. Thanks to gp for mentioning this as I had not heard of it, yet had considered getting the previous GP2X in the past. Does anyone have an idea of the cost of this thing?

You might want to take a look at OpenPandora.

As long as Sony was going to a new design, why oh why did they not add a second thumbstick? Shooters and other console games tend to use two joysticks. in the case of shooters, one stick is used to control movement, while the other is used to control the camera angle. In PSP games, because there's only one joystick, each shooter series uses its own scheme to get around the lack of a second joystick. For what it's worth, I think the best control scheme in a PSP shooter is the one used in the Syphon Filter series. But what sucks is that when you switch games, the whole control scheme changes. It's frustrating when you push just the right buttons to do what you want... in the wrong game.

They put a little depression on the face of the PSP Go in exactly the right place for the second thumbstick, but they put the START and SELECT buttons there. If they had put in another thumbstick and moved those buttons elsewhere, they might have revitalized the whole PSP playform. Ports of console games would have immediately become much easier, allowing the number of games for the platform to grow more quickly. New games could be written with more standard (read: better) control schemes. Backward compatibility would be trivial. The second joystick could simply be ignored by old games. Playing the old games would then be unchanged, while many new possibilities would be created.

I have a PSP 1000, and even that is too small for me. When I try to play with just the PSP 1000 in my hand, it feels too small and fragile. I have an acrylic case that holds the PSP and protects it, and most important for me, gives me a big sturdy thing I don't feel like I'm going to break every time I play (yes, the DS was immediately rejected in part because of how flimsy it looked). I like the video out introduced in the PSP 2000, and I figure that with a good case, the 2000 might be decent.

So to summarize, as Sony has made new versions of the PSP, they have focused on making it smaller and flimsier, a feature I do not want. They have removed the UMD drive, which does away with used game sales and price competition. But they have failed to correct the most glaring defect of the PSP platform since its inception: the lack of a second thumbstick. Well, I'm not a hardcore gamer, so Sony doesn't give a rat's ass about me or my opinion, but I'm keeping an eye on the Pandora. It's a platform that appears to have been, y'know, designed for gaming. It won't have firmware updates to block homebrew games, and no, that doesn't mean I'll only use free or pirated games. I'm perfectly happy buying PSP games, and I'll almost certainly buy some good games for the Pandora too.

You struck the nail on the head. 1500mah batteries are really puny. I've seen 4250 mah in similar sized devices. (somewhere between a DS and DS lite in size, but a bit thicker)

A fat phone(or heck, just a larger phone in all directions) could have magnitudes larger batteries and battery life.

Wifi nails a lot of battery life, as does the screen. The Pandora devs gave some specific measurements - the Pandora has a separate chip for measuring consumption.

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49385-current-drains-by-speed-and-device/page__view__findpost__p__751966
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49478-pandora-battery-upgrade/page__view__findpost__p__753323

Playing PSX4all at 500MHz: 599mA (peak value I saw) and at 800MHz: 692mA (peak value)

Here was an idling kernel with various backlight settings:
100% - 507mA
88% - 484mA
70% - 456mA
53% - 424mA
35% - 390mA
18% - 364mA
0% - 337mA

You can see that turning that backlight down when not needed can add a fair bit of battery life. You can also see that overclocking the ARM core does not have a significant impact on battery life (relatively speaking). It certainly will reduce battery life but 2x the clock does not mean 1/2 the battery life.

So that puts CPU/GPU power consumption in the sub-100mw range. Under half the consumption of an LED-backlit LCD, and probably still less than OLED.

Really, the solution for phones is to make them bigger. Pockets are fairly large - a bigger phone with a tactile thumb-keyboard, loaded up with a 4200-6000 mah battery and closed-source power management drivers would get ludcrious battery life. Easily a day or two.

Can you imagine a phone as heavy as a Gameboy? That thing would easily have 20k mah in a Li-Po battery. 5-10 days of talk time and usage!

We are in dire need of an eqiuvalent to the Arduino platform in the PDA market. Small, cheap, relyable, open standards, with a simple single-touch screen a neat CPU and some run-off-the-mill LitIon battery industry standard.

Coming this holiday season: the Pandora PDA. It's a gaming PDA wrapped around what is essentially a BeagleBoard. Like the iPod Touch, it's not a phone, so I'm not billed per month for services I won't use.