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Pandora Console Ready For Pre-Orders
Croakyvoice writes "Finally, months after the official announcement, 3,000 lucky people can now pre-order Pandora, possibly the world's fastest handheld console. It boasts a processor capable of up to 900 MHZ, PowerVR 3D graphics, a large 800x480 LCD touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, dual SD card slots, TV out, dual analogue and digital controls, a clamshell DS Lite-style shape, and a 43-button mini keyboard. The console already boasts an amazing amount of ready-for-release software such as Ubuntu and many full-speed emulators for systems such as Snes, Amiga, Megadrive, and many more that are not publicly announced yet. The console is as powerful as the original Xbox and on a par with the Nintendo Wii. Those interested should visit OpenPandora.Org. For the full history of Pandora from inception until the present, check out the Pandora Homebrew Site."
It boasts a processor capable of up to 900 MHZ,
It is 'possibly' the world's fastest console.
It "boasts" an amazing amount of ready-for-release software such as Ubuntu and many full-speed emulators
The console is as powerful as the original Xbox and on a par with the Nintendo Wii.
All this, and we are lucky to pre-order???
Lisa: They can't seriously expect us to swallow that tripe.
Skinner: Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat
Council, please help yourself to this tripe.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
What I love is the fact that the world map has a broken link for North America, Japan/Korea, and Australia. I got the emailed newsletter that contains the working direct link and a link to the world map. It's still not fixed after 14 hours. You'd think they'd actually test it sometime today.
It's neat, but it doesn't seem to be very ergonomically designed.
The Internet is generally stupid
This is so like another console from a few years back (Gizmondo?) that looked like an old-skool gamers dream machine with GPS and whatever else thrown in the mix but ultimately it died a death as it really wasn't of interest to the mass market.
Gizmondo had a lockout chip to keep out homebrewers, which wasn't cracked until after the system was discontinued. Pandora, on the other hand, is designed without a lockout chip on purpose.
Also, its flexibility is its downfall - Joe public won't be able to work out what it is for - it's too much of an 'everything plus the kitchen sink' device.
So are the iPod Touch and the model with a built-in phone, but that's selling like hotcakes.
Why oh why can't a device that looks like a potential competitor for a N810 have GPS built-in?
It would raise the bill of materials unacceptably. But it does have two USB ports and two SD slots that could probably be used for SDIO. Enthusiasts will find which GPS dongles work best with Pandora.
You realise that it pretty much beats the Nokia N800 and such at what they do, right? I mean, it runs Ubuntu and has a 43-key keyboard!
You just got troll'd!
Battery life is said to be between 10 to 12 hours of normal usage ..
I ordered one. Can't wait to get it, as its got a lot of power and will make a superlative machine for developing music/synthesis/effects application .. plus the odd game or two, of course, lol ..
For those saying "It will Never Take Off", so? As long as Craig&Co. can make a tidy profit selling it as a niche item, it will be awesome anyway - the hardware itself is superlative, and the development scene for this console is like nothing else - even if they only sell a few thousand, thats at least going to give a few thousand people an awesome system to play with.
Don't forget: its totally open. So it won't "die" as long as there are people willing to get one and code for it, for their own purposes. Gizmondo and all that: dead coz Joe Blow Hacker can't code for it, easily. Pandora: Very, very easy to write code for it, so even if there are no commercial entities getting behind it as a mainstream console, it will still be highly useful to those who bought it ..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Battery life is listed as "10+ hours". Thank ARM's non-crack-filled view on how power efficient a chip can be.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
this is a completely open source project, is there so far any good open source gps program?
i've seen a few nice programs that work with bitmap maps from various sites, but those maps become huge, so it's useless on a large scale.
if a good opensource gps program does exist, porting it to the pandora, and attaching a gps receiver shouldn't be so hard
do these guys have the official nintendo devkit or something to affirm that one?
because you know, you cant compare diferent cpus just by the clock or cache size, that to not mention the video chips that are probably radically diferent.
Yeah, because everybody who's into technology is a fat ugly smelly loserly git. That's easily explained by the fact that you have to sell your coolness to the devil to know how to use vi.
You just got troll'd!
I always thought that a modern slashdot'ting was a myth due to a poor, database-heavy configuration with insufficient oomph behind the servers. Then some git links to gp32x.com which had one of my GP2X ports as the second item on the front page (outside of the top visible screen). So my two-links-deep, petty news item on something vaguely related to the story (a quick recompile for GP2X) makes my traffic for the month of October (i.e. one day) pass my total traffic for the month of September (30 days) within a matter of hours.
God knows what temperature gp32x.com is hitting right now. Strangely, though, my adsense hits/clicks read normal. I *knew* I should have released my other port so that I was in the No.1 spot on that site when Slashdot hit...
Now if Google implemented their selection of SDL or whatever on Android .. ;D
Would be nice with a more standard platform for emulators and such on the Linux devices instead of multiple ones (I guess they are very easy to port to android anyway though.)
Nope, N810 can also act as a (non-powered) USB host, and also has Bluetooth (I'm quite confident, since it talks to my Bluetooth keyboard pretty darned well :-).
N810 has a single rather than dual SDHC slot (the N800 had dual slots, not sure why they dropped that in the N810), slide-out keyboard (rather than clamshell design), and same resolution screen, but lacks the gaming controls and DSP.
N810 runs Maemo Linux (with GTK+ graphics), though I believe a port of Ubuntu is available or in-work, and is about the same price. Looks about the same size.
Biggest difference to me (other than N810 being a third generation device shipping in volume) - N810 has an official Palm Garnet emulator that runs all those games I bought in my Treo days. It'd be a Good Thing is Access would port that to Pandora as well.
They look pretty similar to me. N810 topped Amazon's Electronics best seller list a while back. If Pandora is well-implemented and can get some marketing behind it, it could do well. I hope so - Choice Is Good.
I have a radio... It's capable of more than 10 GHz.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Joking, but it actually did take me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why on earth someone would want a handheld console of all things... I think we Unix geeks had dibs on that word before gamers. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Leave the Pandora out of the mix, it's not Korean at all. It's made in Europe and the "headquarters" are in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
You just got troll'd!
Its actually a Beowulf cluster of these things, powered by a bloke on a bike. This may be the first slashdotting of a human.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
There were far more reasons as to why the Gizmondo failed......
http://www.gamerevolution.com/images/feature/gizmondo/flow_chart.gif
The biggest difference between the Gizmondo and the Pandora is that the latter is intended for home-brew only, and is certainly not aimed as a PSP killer. With that in mind, it's hard to see how the Pandora can fail, bring down a large electronics company, destroy a Ferrari Enzo, and lose millions of investors cash in quite the same way as the Gizmondo managed......
With the netbook you're getting something that will run most older emulators well, and a machine which is more usable for casual net use. I run a big stack of emulators for older consoles on an ancient Toshiba laptop (with a mere Celeron 500) with no problems. With a 1.6GHz Atom, I'd guess Project64 (N64) and ePSXe (Playstation) work well... Anyone out there tried yet?
Andy
If you can make the "world's fastest console", shouldn't you host on at least a "world's somewhat resilient server"?
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Yeah, because showing me that some consoles can take a longer time proves that this one took an insane short time. Very logical. By that standard I guess developing a video game in 5 years is an insane short time just because DNF is taking more than twice that.
You just got troll'd!
But that is exactly it's market. It's a product for a community that already exists and that is already buying it, so it will be a success. Beating nintendo is not the goal, making a great device with features that a few thousand people want is enough of a success, from my point of view. I'm unsure whether it will make enough money to compensate the amount of time spent designing it, but not everything is about the money. I'm sure they actually love the device themselves, say.
I bought the GP2X when it came out as a portable media player/ games machine. It sucked batteries dry at an alarming rate and has sat in my drawer unused after about the 4th set! I have an Eee900 (20Gb Linux) which I like quite a bit - it can play Urban Terror quite well, has loads for me to fiddle with (mods, software etc) and cost me about £50 more than this Pandora. So why do I want a Pandora?? Small, battery life... Anything else?
Do we really want to open this box?
Ah, someone putting a logical rebuttal being modded down as flamebait. Classic Slashdot modding!
Of course, the parent post should be modded above its own parent post, which posits that "Since X is worse than Y, Z (being less worse than Y) is good."
But hey! why mod down a logical fallacy when you can mod the rebuttal as flamebait?
(I confidently await being modded to -43 Ridiculous meta-meta-moderation comments)
The Lynx flopped.
The power was that killed it. All super-powerful colour handhelds back then ate batteries like candy.
The GameBoy didn't survive *despite* being balck'n'white, it survived *because* it was black'n'white and could actually be carried everywhere (and not kept tied to a power cord).
Currently with the advance in power consumption and battery technology, this point isn't relevant any more.
The second main point is game library. That's something that several concurrent of the Lynx did understand : Nintendo quickly released lots of games for GameBoy (and each successive machine inherited with all the past library through retro-compatibility), Sega and NEC built handhelds compatible with the then huge library of home console games (sadly their machine where colour and power hungry).
Last but not least : ease of development and attraction of 3rd party developers.
the original GamePark had a huge success to the point that anything developed with source available systematically had a GP32 port.
It didn't have a huge success in big commercial developers, but it was incredibly successful in the indie and homebrew community with tons of developed softs.
Don't be surprised if Pandora does too.
The Pandora open-console is a successor of this kind of platform :
- Maybe you won't see latest success from some company like Squaresoft or Bungie targeting it.
- But you just *know* that it will see tons of emulators and ports (which will be functionnal, thanks to decent input - something not possible on iPhone).
It takes more than being "the most powerful" to succeed in gaming.
It takes having a library of software, something that the Pandora will have through indie and homebrew channel.
It takes actually being usable (and not taking too much power like old colour handheld or lacking decent inputs like an iPhone).
I'm sure the Nintendo DS portable will still be #1 for several more years.
And this will probably stay that way, Nintendo DS will probably stay the #1 mainstream handheld. ...but...
There's a n interesting example that you missed in your list :
the Wii.
Which is currently an incredibly huge success even if it is one generation behind all concurents.
Because it targets a completely different market.
Pandora can have a decent success just like the GP32 and GP2x had before it, if it target the homebrew/indie communities.
It has also enough horsepower to run Linux (I mean: more than a simple embed firmware, but actually run Apps too). Thus it could run basic PIM applications. (Calendar, phonebook, editor, etc.) It could also be a good entry in the PDA/Console hybrid market (something that hasn't seen anything new since Tapwave bankrupted).
I currently have a Zodiac 2 that I carry around everywhere and have always had other PalmOS PDAs (together with a foldable keyboard and an antique GPRS/Bluetooth/IrDA enabled phone its a perfect solution to browser / mail / chat / ssh). I could pretty much see myself replacing this with a Pandora.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
With a name like that I am just wondering whether I should be opening the box. ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Anybody who has opened a Jaguar can see it used a 16/32-bit 68000 for its "brain"
There were three CPUs inside a Jaguar. An MC68000 (intended as an input/output procesor or "IOP") sat next to the game controllers. A 32-bit RISC CPU ("Tom") was on the GPU die, and another 32-bit RISC CPU ("Jerry") sat next to the APU. The "64-bit designation" of the Jaguar comes from the 64-bit data bus between Tom and RAM. What confuses a lot of critics is that games varied in how they allocated tasks between Tom and the IOP. Some games, especially those developed by Genesis/Amiga/Atari ST veterans, would run game logic on the IOP and use Tom only to render graphics. Other games would run on Tom and use the IOP only for a couple tasks such as reading the controllers. The real thing that made the Jag more of a pain than, say, the PS2 was that Tom had a lot of architectural defects, notably that functions run from main RAM had to be split into segments no bigger than 256 bytes.
In any case, the N64 is clearly more powerful than the PS1. Just compare the 3D virtual world of Banjo-Kazooie versus one of the PS1 Spyro games.
Banjo might beat Spyro, but Forsaken looked sharper and ran with more frames per second on a PlayStation than on an N64.