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http://openpandora.org/
It's taking a while, but they are getting there.

For me, the requirements of a low monthly fee and the ability to run free software happen to outweigh the requirement of fewer things in my pocket, which is why I'm waiting for a Pandora PDA.

I wish I could say the same, but I have a 3 object maximum: wallet, keys, phone. Everything else stays in the bowl no matter how often I remind myself to pick it back up.

Buy a second-hand iphone 2g, jailbreak and unlock it, run FOSS and a prepaid SIM. That's still legal no matter how Jobs may rant.

When I had a Palm pilot and a cheap nokia, I had two devices in my pocket.

Some people will take a jack of all trades; others want a master of one and a master of another. For example, say I want a handheld computer, and I want a phone. If all available phones fail to meet my requirements, then I will buy a separate handheld computer and phone. For me, the requirements of a low monthly fee and the ability to run free software happen to outweigh the requirement of fewer things in my pocket, which is why I'm waiting for a Pandora PDA.

I agree. I don't know why no company is designing an ultimate traveller's netbook.

The closest I've found is the Touchbook, which gets about 10 hours battery life while in use with screen brightness ramped up. The Pandora apparently gets between 9 and 15 hours depending on what you're doing, and whether you're willing to lower screen brightness at all.

Both of these are OMAP3 devices. Couldn't they just stick the same SoC in a netbook frame with a huge battery for awesome battery life?

I guess for now the only option is a Pandora with a bunch of extra $20 batteries.

Huh? ARM processors are always built into SoCs - System on a Chip.

An example is the TI OMAP3530. The chip uses slightly under a watt when going full throttle, with CPU, GPU, and DSP.

It features a Cortex A8 @ 600 or 720mhz (rivals a Pentium 3 at the same speed), which can be overclocked to between 800-900mhz.

It has an SGX 530 GPU (Basically a DX10 GPU with GF6200LE speeds - but it has immature closed-source drivers that only support OGL ES 2.0 and 1.1. No DirectX at all, despite the capabilities of the hardware.

It has a C64x DSP, which is a highly parallel and limited processor with massive throughput. Apparently it can decode 1080p H.264 - TI has licensed evaluation codecs proving this - but there are no free or open source DSP codecs available at the moment.

It has an ISP(Image Signal Processor) providing free S-Video out and upscaling.

And like I said, all with under a watt of power consumption. You can stick as much RAM as you want on it, in 128MiB blocks soldered directly to it. Most OMAP3530 devices opt for 256MiB because of the cost.

Perfect use scenarios are phones, consoles, and hacker toys. But with P3 performance, some will also make it into low end cheap Netbooks, paving the way for A9's.

So it's basically a Pandora phone, rather than console? And backed by a huge company, which means mass production in the hundreds of thousands to millions.

VLC media player

InfoWorld is based in California. VLC media player includes patented codecs not licensed for distribution in California or elsewhere in the United States.

OpenPandora to put Pandora on your desktop and scrobble to Last.fm

Too easy to confuse with a forthcoming Linux PDA.

Careful with that box, buddy. It's copyright Pandora. (As are its contents.)

Pandora is open source.

And in 2 months, the Pandora will be released!

The technology is definitely out there, my handhald with 9" has 800x480

That's nothing, check out the Pandora: 800x480 on a 4.3" screen

Can be purchased with cash in the United States [...] GP2X fails

Keep your eye on http://www.openpandora.org/

I am aware of the Pandora PDA, expected to be out by the fourth quarter of 2009, but I am not aware of a U.S. retail chain that has committed to stock it. As I understand it, it will be available exclusively through mail order, an option that isn't open to children who are paying with accumulated cash.

Keep your eye on http://www.openpandora.org/

Why can't laptop vendors be more like these guys?

Their little device is sold as "around 10+ hours", which turns into 15-16 for music, 10-11 for web browsing, and about 8-9 for emulators.

But then again, their device is so small that they had to take preorders to pay for it. Lying about that stuff would seal their doom, while with a huge company more sales(even based on false specs) appease the investors.

good architecture

Don't you mean ludicrously good architecture?

I'm thinking Cortex A8's, which have been out for over a year. Stuff like the OMAP 3530(present in the Beagleboard, upcoming Pandora Handheld, and Palm Pre) consumes remarkably small amounts of power.

The Pandora developers said their device consumes around or just over 1 watt. Most of that is from the LCD. They did experiments completely shutting off certain hardware, to measure power consumption, and concluded...

CPU - about 20-40mw DSP - about 30-60mw SGX GPU - about 30-60mw

(Hard to get exact measurements due to the nature of how components interact. Anything loading the CPU probably loads up the memory as well. Anything hitting the GPU will hit the CPU, and DSP load varies greatly depending on the codec and video being decoded.)

The entire SoC uses a ludicrously small amount of power; something like 0.2-0.4w. Then add another 0.6w for the LCD, and a bunch more for wireless.

Now, compare that to the current Atoms, with 6+ watts just for the CPU/chipset, another 2+ for the HDD/SSD, at least 6-15w for the LCD, etc...

If any company can drive down their power consumption, Intel can, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to catch ARM!

I just can't wait for Cortex A9's. Quad-core ARM in the exact same power envelope!

To be fair, the Atom runs at 6 Watts max, where average TDP can down to as little as 0.4W. The problem with Atom, as you say, is all of the other hardware to make it work. Its current chipset is incredibly power hungry, but they're working on that (integrating more and doing even deeper clock gating). Future Atoms will likely use even less power, with Intel already shipping chips with a max 2.4W threshold.

And yes, you are being unfair comparing a device which has a hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes of space and a WXSVGA screen to a handheld device with a couple of gigs of flash memory and a HVGA screen. Nobody's stopping you from making an Atom device with those components (though it will take more power right now, it'll be vastly faster than the Cortex A8, and you won't have to recompile or use highly specialized toolkits, which is a huge Intel advantage).

good architecture

Don't you mean ludicrously good architecture?

I'm thinking Cortex A8's, which have been out for over a year. Stuff like the OMAP 3530(present in the Beagleboard, upcoming Pandora Handheld, and Palm Pre) consumes remarkably small amounts of power.

The Pandora developers said their device consumes around or just over 1 watt. Most of that is from the LCD. They did experiments completely shutting off certain hardware, to measure power consumption, and concluded...

CPU - about 20-40mw
DSP - about 30-60mw
SGX GPU - about 30-60mw

(Hard to get exact measurements due to the nature of how components interact. Anything loading the CPU probably loads up the memory as well. Anything hitting the GPU will hit the CPU, and DSP load varies greatly depending on the codec and video being decoded.)

The entire SoC uses a ludicrously small amount of power; something like 0.2-0.4w. Then add another 0.6w for the LCD, and a bunch more for wireless.

Now, compare that to the current Atoms, with 6+ watts just for the CPU/chipset, another 2+ for the HDD/SSD, at least 6-15w for the LCD, etc...

If any company can drive down their power consumption, Intel can, but that doesn't mean it'll be easy to catch ARM!

I just can't wait for Cortex A9's. Quad-core ARM in the exact same power envelope!

Why don't they allow homebrew then? They let people install Linux on their PS3.

Because Linux for PLAYSTATION 3 has no access to the NVIDIA RSX GPU apart from a dumb frame buffer, it is less powerful than a PC for 3D games. The big draws of a PS3 over a PC are 1. you get to use most of the Cell CPU's DSP cores (except for one that the hypervisor reserves), and 2. the PS3 can display on an older, pre-HD television without needing a $40 box to convert VGA to S-Video. So it's better than a PC for high-performance computing, but the PC is better for homebrew gaming.

I'm guessing that Sony put Linux on the PS3 because Sony wanted to train developers to write the firmware for other products using a Cell CPU. A PSP, on the other hand, has a fairly traditional architecture. In addition, the PS3 had pressure from another platform: if you can homebrew on a PC running Windows (using tools such as MinGW or Python), you're more likely to buy games for the PC. I haven't seen a lot of PDAs with 3D graphics or traditional gaming controls yet.

I ask for ARM UMPCs and get ARM netbooks.

Is an "ARM UMPC" essentially a PDA with a keyboard? If so, then wait for Pandora to enter mass production.

I'm personally holding out for a Pandora, assuming it doesn't get delay for too much longer. Much more powerful hardware and a truly free software handheld console, I can't wait :)

Imagine an android phone with the directional controls done right.

http://openpandora.org/

Oh yeah, this video also makes me drool. Damn, Nintendo should throw that into the next-gen DS. That would be phenomenal. Or hell, they should just snap up Pandora and sell it as the DS2, or something. ARM is awesome.

Meh, the G1 doesn't let you flash your own OS onto it by default, unless you hack it. And Android doesn't let you run native programs by default either, only ones running on the Dalvik VM. I hardly consider that open. Just because it runs Linux as its kernel doesn't make it inherently open. At the same time, it's light-years ahead of the iPhone OS, but I would still consider it behind WinMo. But I think I'll skip the whole smartphone problem and just get a Pandora, and do whatever the hell I want with it.

Android will likely run on the Pandora. The Pandora is the spiritual successor to the GP2X. (as opposed to actual successor)

A bunch of community/forum elites got tired of fighting with lame design choices like the difficult to use joystick, or poorly thought out DPAD, or removal of networking/debugging support; they're making their own dream handheld, which is significantly more powerful, and is designed right.

According to them, it has the best input scheme they've ever tried. ;) That could just be creators tooting their own horn, but after talking with them and reading their posts for the past year, I really doubt it.

The GP2X F100 was the best version of the GP2X, with every version after that getting worse. Updating firmware was absolutely horrible, as no less than five versions of the GP2X were released, all of them bricked by different versions of the firmware.

Despite the lame joystick, the F100 v1 was the best because of projects like USB networking, USB debugging, and even a Java VM. Then GPH replaced the USB chip with a cheaper one, cutting two of those features, and they continued to make bad choices after that.

Despite all this, the community persists.

The GP2X has very lackluster hardware, but emus are reported to run better on it than on a PSP or even iPhone. (despite both of those having significantly faster hardware) That's because of the relatively open nature of the platform.

Most of the GP2X community (gp32x) is throwing their weight behind the Pandora, because it's fully open, rather than just relatively open. We don't want to have our input ignored, then fight with lame design choices. We want the devs to listen, and we want a platform that has mature open source drivers available - a platform like the OMAP 3530. :)

Ah, awesome, thanks for the info! Sounds like a good project. :)
-Taylor

Android will likely run on the Pandora. The Pandora is the spiritual successor to the GP2X. (as opposed to actual successor)

A bunch of community/forum elites got tired of fighting with lame design choices like the difficult to use joystick, or poorly thought out DPAD, or removal of networking/debugging support; they're making their own dream handheld, which is significantly more powerful, and is designed right.

According to them, it has the best input scheme they've ever tried. ;) That could just be creators tooting their own horn, but after talking with them and reading their posts for the past year, I really doubt it.

The GP2X F100 was the best version of the GP2X, with every version after that getting worse. Updating firmware was absolutely horrible, as no less than five versions of the GP2X were released, all of them bricked by different versions of the firmware.

Despite the lame joystick, the F100 v1 was the best because of projects like USB networking, USB debugging, and even a Java VM. Then GPH replaced the USB chip with a cheaper one, cutting two of those features, and they continued to make bad choices after that.

Despite all this, the community persists.

The GP2X has very lackluster hardware, but emus are reported to run better on it than on a PSP or even iPhone. (despite both of those having significantly faster hardware) That's because of the relatively open nature of the platform.

Most of the GP2X community (gp32x) is throwing their weight behind the Pandora, because it's fully open, rather than just relatively open. We don't want to have our input ignored, then fight with lame design choices. We want the devs to listen, and we want a platform that has mature open source drivers available - a platform like the OMAP 3530. :)

Look back at what the GP2X has done, and you'll see that they hold up to the 'open' promise.

But if you want a real open device, then go here: http://www.openpandora.org/ Inspired by the GP2X, and everything that was wrong with it.

http://openpandora.org/ this is made by some of the same people that were on the first GP2X team i believe. from what i've read it seems more promising.

The Pandora is an ARM-based PDA/UMPC/PSP thingy. Tiny screen, so not a netbook, but it has a good battery life(10+ hours of actual use on a new battery) and HOMM 2 has been ported! :D

Now the question - Netbook or PDA? You choose!

I dunno how well this will play WoW, but if it does it might be what you're looking for in a mobile gaming platform.

http://openpandora.org/

It's not really a netbook, but it does have a qwerty keyboard.

All PSP-1000 and PSP-2000 models are crackable using a modified, so-called Pandora Battery.

But Pandora isn't even out yet. If it were, people wouldn't need PSP homebrew. Why did people start calling it a "Pandora battery" instead of a "service battery" or a "-1 battery" anyway?

I'd prefer a Pandora

That way I can slack off playing old SNES games like that security guard in the corner. :P

The Pandora has some of what you desire.

It's got a powerful Arm Cortex-A8 with an efficient GPU, faster than the iPhone one. No SSD, but it has dual-SDHC, giving you up to 64GB of space.

Only a 4.3 "anemic" LCD, but it is high resolution(fine for webpages) and high quality(it was selected because there was no OLED equivalent as far as resolution, power consumption, lifespan, etc.) An OLED would still be superior in direct sunlight, but I think they made a good choice. It's also has a touchscreen, though admittedly not the same type as the iPhone. (works best with stylus)

The big negative for you would be no 3G. You need an external dongle to do that. I think these things were verified to work.

ARM Ubuntu does run on the Pandora prototypes, but they're putting lots of effort into modifying the Angstrom distro to suit the device. It seems to be pretty user friendly and run fast enough, so most of us early adopters will probably just use that.

The big thing where it nails your desires is power consumption. (300+ hours in standby) They've stated it should last months in standby, if their dev boards are anything to go on, while your battery is still relatively new.

Under load you can expect at least 10 hours battery life. (This would be watching vids or playing games/emus) No guarantees for 24 hours when web browsing, but for music at least 24 hours is expected. One of the creators said they already have aggressive power management built into the kernel, so it should downclock for light usage tasks to save watts.

Best yet, the cost is only $340 USD, and they'll toss in another 4000mAh Li-Po battery for a meagre $30.

It fits about 60-80% of what you want, if you're willing to get over the screen size. Look into it.

I think the point of the article is, it scales well. The GPU code isn't heavily CPU dependant, so with a powerful GPU, you can really ramp up the graphics quality and amount of stuff onscreen.

ES 2.0 support is interesting. It means it might work on devices like the Pandora or iPhone, with some modifications.

Some ARM chips these days go far beyond what one would expect from a RISC micro-controller.

Two great examples are the BeagleBoard, which also uses the same hardware as the OpenPandora gaming platform. Both of the aformentioned devices are running a fully open-source Linux-powered stack, complete with a fully-functional Desktop environment. For developers, you can program for these devices using the standar GNU tools (c,c++), and of course several JavaVM's are already ported to the OMAP (JamVM,OpenJDK,Kaffee,etc)

.

The TI OMAP 3530 chip that powers the BeagleBoard and OpenPandora has a 3D graphics acceleration unit, a 2D (video) graphics acceleration unit, and a built in DSP for audio and general-purpose number crunching.

Without question a large majority of users do little more with their mobile computers than browse the internet, write email, and occasionally stream video - all things that are fully achievable with today's ARM chips.

ARM chip manufacturers are also starting to put multi-core chips on the market, and while the transistor complexity is nothing like Intel's out-of-order logic, multi-core, still means serious multi-threading. With clock frequencies approaching and exceeding 1GHz, I would not be surprised to see ARM take over the mobile and netbook markets, especially considering how little power they actually consume.

Furthermore, even high-end x86 laptops could benefit from having an ARM co-processor for instant-on and mobile operation, while the x86 processor could be used for more compute-intensive applications such as CAD or video processing. Imagine battery power extended by a factor of ten for everyone!

YouTube Videos:
BeagleBoard
OpenPandora

This has not been such a good year for open hardware projects. First OLPC, and now OpenMoko. I would say that both projects may have been overly ambitious, and were certainly poorly managed. I wonder, what will be next? OpenPandora? Can anyone list any successful open hardware projects?

This is why the only third-party "console" I'll buy is the Pandora. They put a lot of effort into creating a comfortable intuitive control scheme.

Even if it fails for commercial games, there's enough emus available that I won't feel like it's wasted money. And it can double as a cheap PDA.

Hmmm... Maybe tweak this?

http://openpandora.wordpress.com/

... since I ordered one.. :-)

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/09/pegatron-and-freescale-team-for-low-power-ultra-cheap-netbooks/

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Or for something smaller than a netbook:
http://openpandora.org/

This device is built on the same hardware platform (TI-OMAP3 ARM Cortex-A8) as the Pandora, but in a larger form factor. This is great news for the community as it will mean that much more software available for the Cortex-A8 platform.
More info follows:
- ARM® Cortex(TM)-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
- 430-MHz TMS320C64x+(TM) DSP Core
- PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
http://www.openpandora.org/

Do these other systems you're talking about have touch screens? Do you have a link?

Here are those links.
http://beagleboard.org/
http://openpandora.org/

The OpenPandora project has a 4.3" touchscreen (at 800x480) and is really exciting to follow. I'll probably purchase their second batch. Many of the indie game developers for the system are testing on the BeagleBoard while waiting for the Pandora to actually ship as the two platforms are so similar hardware-wise. Full specs available through the links.

I was going to buy a PS3, but why should I support a company that discourages me from using my hardware how I want?

The open pandora system looks like a much better place to spend my money. An open source handheld gaming system, yes, it can work: http://openpandora.org/

Who needs a jailed Linux distro having devices like Pandora? You are free to install or modify it, not just stuff authorized by the vendor.

Pandora is not just more powerful than most commercial devices, but makes you run software available for Linux and has a good community. It's also prepared for gaming as the community has roots in the homebrew gaming scene of Dreamcast, GP32, Zodiac and GP2X.

I think the power of the homebrew community is getting more strong with the time. This even happens with commercial devices like Android1 and iPhone (and video game systems too), and it's never going to be stopped even if companies like Apple and others try to do it (even if by using the law).

I always think of that web development as a necessary evil, why convert the application development in another hell? Even the web standards are not strong enough and companies like Microsoft are not forced to a 100% accurate implementation of them without non-standard crap implemented as in Internet Explorer.

I'll be able to use any kind of bluetooth device with my Pandora (not possible on iPhone), connect any cell phone for internet (iPhone has builtin cell phone, but what happens if new standard with higher transfer rates appears), play tons of homebrew games and emulators (iPhone lacks proper gaming controls), use Firerox or any WebKit browser (no Firefox on iPhone), and even emulate PalmOS (again, not possible on iPhone). I'll not be persecuted of being called a delinquent for installing non-standard stuff on it, and I'll be able to develop for a platform available on a lot of different places instead need to use the API of a niche platform.

If you want to know more about Pandora, there are some sites like openpandora.org and openpandora.wordpress.com

The tech is all around. All we need is someone who is willing to do it.

Here you go: http://openpandora.org/

I don't know about laptops, but there's a PDA-like device called the Pandora.

It meets your "all day" requirement - according to the devs, it has a ~10hr battery life when doing stuff like browsing the net. It can also drop into and out of standby very quickly, to save even more power when not in use.

It has a touchscreen, mini keyboard, and gaming controls, so it does a bit of everything. Good for note-taking, good for surfing, good for emulators.

The biggest negative is right now they aren't in mass production; the devs required pre-orders to pay for them, since it's a small team of FOSS junkies making it. :P

Screwed up the URL, it's Openpandora

yep, Pandora fills this niche. 0.3kg, ARM, 10h battery, runs ubuntu just normally. But it's very small, only a 4.3" screen 800x480. About the size of DS. http://openpandora.org/

It's just a startup now, people did preorders (by preordering it means that you are trusting them ;) and it will be delivered about March or April. I expect that by the end of the year they will be selling it in online shops in a usual way.

It's a perfect UMPC for me, a really "mobile" PC, smaller than my wallet, actually.

Not a problem for everyone. I've already got an ARM-based Linux running on a NSLU32 NAS head - 32Mb RAM, 32 Mb flash. If I could get a lightweight laptop with a modern ARM chip, I would be over the moon.

I just ordered one of these. 256MB RAM, 512MB flash, ARM Cortex-A8.

They will ship somewhere around April or March. That's the whole point of pre-ordering. See the videos, like for example the last one, of a prototype (there are other movies as well, with working ubuntu, openoffice, gimp, etc.. - see the links in OP), which is now heading into mass production.

The OpenPandora guys were wise enough to not take any loans from banks, and so they are safe now despite the worldwide financial crisis. Instead they let people to make preorders about three months ago. People who don't trust, were not required to preorder ;) Their servers almost overloaded when preordering started, anyway. They sold about 1000 units in first 10h (or so - this post was written 17 hours after preordering started). And the first batch is just 4000 units. If you keep your eye on it, maybe you will be lucky to get one from the second batch, there are lots of people who want it.

I have preordered the Pandora console and I'm happy. It gives me about 10h of running Ubuntu on an ARM cpu in a mere 0.3 kg of weight.

Oh thre's also an unofficial blog and a video vault. You might like the forums too.

There's more going on here than a simple drop in sales due to the current economic climate. The last desktop PC I bought (just over a year ago) was the last PC I will buy. There was a time when a computer was a thing that filled a room, then it filled a single rack, then a desktop box. We are (over)due for the next paradigm shift which will be to small mobile devices. My next computing device will be a Pandora, coupled with a head mounted display. Finally we will be free of the Wintel stranglehold that has been dominant for the past couple of decades.

http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/omap3530.html

The omap3530 can do HD, and it's not even an Intel processor, it's an ARM, so the power savings are enormous.

http://openpandora.org/

This device will be able to play HD in about the size of a DS lite. It's not out yet however.

http://beagleboard.org/hardware Right now, you can buy a beagle board which will do mostly the same thing, except not in a real handheld.