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First Pandora Console Reaches Customer

Posted by Soulskill on from the insert-pandora's-unboxing-pun-here dept.

neogramps writes "It's been a long time coming, but the first Pandora consoles are finally rolling off of the production line. (Well, this one actually walked out the door to a customer who lived near the 'factory.') Initial estimates had put production and development at taking two months, but Murphy had other ideas. Banking issues, design problems, problems communicating with the Chinese moulding company, escalating assembly costs, and even a volcano all managed to get in the way, but the small and dedicated team soldiered on, and just over a year and a half later, the wait is coming to an end for the 4,000 pre-orderers."

16 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Already seems obsolete.... by ZosX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    2 years ago these specs would have been exciting, but with smartphones already pushing over 1ghz and 512mb ram, I don't see the appeal. Pandora seems destined to be an emulator lover's delight and not much more. Sure you can run android on it, but it only has a 600mhz processor and 256mb ram. The same specs as a motorola droid. I guess $300 is an ok price to play every console game before the playstation, but my laptop does that and has a nice big screen too. 2 years ago I would have drooled at this machine (and I did), but anymore it seems like it will be so radically obsolete in a short period of time. My phone is already portable internet enough for me. If anything, I'd much rather have a nice 8-10" tablet that I can share my phone's 3g connection with. Once the tablets start getting near the $300 price point, I think things will get pretty interesting. I guess you could say that the pandora is like the ultimate portable console, but only if you don't want to play any newer games.

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    zosxavius photography
    1. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by Jaysyn · · Score: 2, Insightful

      My PSP does that & plays all my old PSX games. I got it for $100 used. True it's a little slower & doesn't have a touchscreen, but it works really good for what I need it for. I do hope the Pandora takes off however, I'd like to see every kind of consumer entertainment electronics with an open version legally available.

      --
      There is a war going on for your mind.
    2. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by gilesjuk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's still a good unit because of the controls, the fact it is open and the fact that the CPU is good enough to run numerous emulators.

    3. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by ThoughtMonster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Are you implying that our needs have changed so much during these two years?

      I'm pretty sure that the Pandora is still the most powerful portable game console out there. The battery is a dog (10+ hours of gaming), the controls are said to be more than solid, and the platform (ARM Cortex-A8) is far from obsolete.

    4. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by Hurricane78 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Except for the analog controls, I don’t see where the N900 does not beat it in any way...

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    5. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      iPhone - Tied into an expensive contract, needs jailbroken to actually run anything decent, no hardware buttons

      Kin - Tied into an expensive contract, UI fails, not open

      Zune HD - Less RAM, less open, no hardware buttons

      Viliv S5 - expensive, smaller, less dedicated community, expensive


      The Pandora fills an important role: giving a reasonably powerful cheap-ish device in the hands of programmers and users. Its not going to outsell the DS or PSP, its not a phone, etc.

      Yeah, the Pandora would have been much nicer had it shipped on time, but its still not a terrible device.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    6. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And who -doesn't- want to have a dev board with sharp solder points stuck in their pocket? And who -doesn't- want to compile everything themselves and send it via the serial port? A dev board has its place, the one you linked to would be great for a small robotics project or even a little web-enabled alarm clock or something. For replacing the Pandora? No. The entire point why we buy "consumer" electronics is that most things are simply there, we download a few binaries a few ROMs and soon we are playing Super Mario World on it. We don't need to compile the kernel, fiddle around till we get X working, spend time optimizing it for speed, etc. There is a time and place for such things, the Pandora is filling a different niche.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    7. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by KDR_11k · · Score: 2, Insightful

      iPhone - Tied into an expensive contract

      iPod Touch - Same thing without the contract and cheaper (and fits in regular sized pockets too! Convenient for listening to audio files on the go).

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    8. Re:Already seems obsolete.... by BikeHelmet · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How many commercially successful devices have been launched that were aimed at developers first, users second. Unless you find favour with the 99% of users that are mere "users", it's going to be very hard to sell enough to keep the bottom line black.

      Beats me - but this device isn't intended to be "commercially successful" in the way you refer.

      About 25% of the people pre-ordering are developers. There could potentially be hundreds to thousands of homebrew projects within the first year - some very high quality.

      The reward for us developers, is other developers creating their own dream apps.

      Face it, average Joe would rather use $600 on a dedicated gaming console that fits in his pocket, a few games, and a case of beer. The Pandora doesn't have that appeal, and is doomed to failure no matter how good it may be for developers.

      You clearly don't understand what "for developers first" means. Your mindset is absolutely correct for a device being sold primarily to users.

      This is not such a device. It is a dream machine - a handheld console that has everything the gp32x community wants. It was designed for that community. The team needs about 12k sales to break even. (which should be doable - there's quite a lot of interest) Once they hit that, it's officially a success. ;)

      Anything beyond that is just groovy - but if it's users rather than developers, they won't be contributing awesome homebrew, will they?

  2. Seems underwhelming. by nxtw · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The Droid Incredible appears to be more powerful while weighing half as much and fitting in a pocket comfortably. Just add a game controller...

    1. Re:Seems underwhelming. by migla · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > the market will be a final arbiter of this beastie...

      Market schmarket. This is the most powerful handheld gaming device out there, running linux, developed by and for an enthusiast community. As far as I'm concerned it is allready a success.

      --
      Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
  3. Riiiiight...... by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Because there is such a vibrant open source game selection. I mean there's Tux Racer, that Civ 2 clone, that Puzzle Bobble Clone... ummm, did I mention Tux Racer?

    Seriously, gaming is one area that OSS does not seem to do well in. There are very few OSS games out there, and they tend to be of poor quality and/or knockoff of old commercial games. Now compare that to the Nintendo DS's games library, which is what this will have to compete with by the way.

    I just do not see the appeal.

    I mean if you want a portable game unit, well then DS has this beat hands down. Not only does it have far, far, FAR more games and most of those are of professional quality, but it is cheaper too. It is between $170 (for the unit) to $200 (for the unit and all accessories).

    Now this thing would also work as a simple, netbook type computer. Ok, except there again you can get another, better device: An actual netbook. For the same price ($330) you can get an MSI Wind U135 which has an Atom, 250GB HD, and Windows on it. There are far more games that'll run on that than this Pandora device.

    As I said, I just fail to see the appeal.

    1. Re:Riiiiight...... by KDR_11k · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem is the lack of a unifying vision. With an original project you need a project leader who can decide on the design but when the workers don't like the design dictated by the leader they leave (in a company they keep working because they're paid to work on things that may not strike their fancy). If you let everybody have a say you get design by committee or just a katamari of incompatible ideas. Deriving from an existing game, whether by making a clone or an opened codebase, at least gives a specific vision that any developer joining the project can see right away and most likely enjoys. I've seen a project where the gameplay was handled opensource style, the result is an ever-morphing mess that gains and sheds features as the participants see shiny objects and that got dominated by a derivative work that was rudimentarily maintained by one dude who followed the vision of the work it was derived from. Meanwhile players complained that the well-maintained project changed too much and was a different game every week.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  4. Insightful? by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, it is a far better game platform, except for the controls but who needs controls to play a game?

    Talk about not getting the point. This ain't about CPU power, it is about having all those controls available on the hardware.

    What next, an article on a sports car being slammed because a jet fighter is far faster so race that instead?

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  5. Re:How open is the software/hardware? by BitZtream · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Jesus Christ.

    Do you want a useful portable game console that promotes OSS

    or

    Do you want a box full of crappy, buggy, half implemented OSS chips that don't do anything good, a lot of things partially, and are all around useless because the devs realized that there isn't an opensource 3d graphics chip thats ready, with all the supporting hardware and software NOW. There isn't an opensource processor with supporting hardware and reference implementations NOW.

    Get the fuck over the whole 'IT MUST BE ALL OSS OR IT SUCKS" thing guys. You have to build pieces and there will always be 'better' closed alternatives, they can take ALL the knowledge and learning from the OSS stuff (not code, knowledge) and add in their own special sauce without telling you the knowledge they gained.

    And to put it bluntly, you're a pretty shitty dev if you haven't yet figured out how to hook binary blobs into OSS code without violating any licensing constraints.

    So ... do you want it to suck for now but be 100% or be usable for now, not 100% open, but taking some of the first steps towards making a place for other open source hardware to work with it and replace the commercial bits there are now.

    Might not want to cut off your face to save your nose.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  6. Re:So... by Alex777 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Serious answer should get modded up. Really, the Pandora is a godsend for all roguelikes, not just Nethack.