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Panasonic Invites Gamers To the Jungle
donniebaseball23 writes "In a move that will instantly conjure up memories of the infamous 3DO failure, Panasonic has once again decided to throw its hat into the gaming ring, unveiling an online-focused handheld called the Jungle. It features a high-resolution display, a D-pad, a touch pad, and a full mini-keyboard in addition to standard gaming shoulder buttons. Wireless support is a given, as Panasonic is talking heavily about the console's online features, but whether that's Wi-Fi or 3G remains unclear. M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon said, 'The Jungle is a highly specialized dedicated portable for a non-existent market. This is an unprecedented hardware strategy, and probably for good reason. If MMO players want to go more portable than a laptop, I guess this would be the way to go. Frankly, this looks like a non-starter.'"
An anonymous reader notes comments from NetDevil's Ryan Seabury, who thinks the decision to have the device run Linux is a mistake.
I mean, look at the most popular gaming handheld today... the nintendo DS! It does not run Linux, and so therefore requires no porting work on it at all! I can play portal and crysis on it no problem, as well as Minesweeper from Windows 95. And don't forget Chip's Challenge. Man, that game was awesome.
Seriously, the whole games-are-bad-on-Linux thing is taken out of context. The argument makes sense for desktop systems, not for a portable gaming platform that's for custom designed games. If something like that ran Windows 7, it would be a disaster. And the fact that TFA mentions how OS X would have been a better choice for Panasonic makes it even more laughable. For something like this, a custom API, architecture, and software distribution is what they are after, and it hardly matters how they implement it. There is little chance this will run the X window system, and if it does, I would hardly enjoy using openoffice with a d-pad.