on the subject of resistive vs capacitative touchscreens, i honestly cannot see a clamshell design like the pandora functioning comfortably enough to make it a worthwhile switch over resistive. to sit and hold the screen in two hands by the lid would put more weight on the hinge than i would be comfortable with. i could see it working on a slider style pandora or one with a rotating hinge clamshell but unless that changes its got to be resistive all the way.
one of the important things i think we have seen with the pandora during its production is just how lucky the team were to have a device that was not so over designed that they couldn't carry out repairs relatively simply and pull in assembly somewhere they could make units themselves. being able to fix LCD damages units and swap parts in and out has been much better and reduced the amount of parts that would have to be scrapped in the end, to the benefit of the project as a whole, so with that in mind we have to consider whether a more aesthetically sophisticated and complicated design would be worth having to rely on other companies to outsource assembly to or in the case of faults, accept a bit of a loss on.
in terms of improvements for me, i would like to be able to hold the pandora and just know it was as rugged and strong as say the DS lite. i have heard that more recent cases are actually a bit better these days bit my case has a few cracks and two of the three tabs on my battery cover have snapped off, and i've probably only taken it off three or four times! i think there has been enough discussion about the hinge over the years that though i have little problem with it as it is, it would not hurt to have something better and more adjustable. it would also be nice perhaps to see a battery revision that might take advantage of the last 4 or so years of battery technological improvement. surely something of the same size could provide better life right now (not that i am disappointed, just thinking we could make an already good thing better). once we have TV-Out cables going, i really do not see any benefit for changing the ext slot to being HDMI, since there are so many other AV benefits to the proposed design. finally in terms of more external form factor, if there is any way to improve the nubs based on the experiences of all the current users, it should be looked in to. it might be an improved dead zone, or a more snapped to central point but hey, its good not to think things cannot be improved.
under the hood we obviously want to preserve compatibility with all the current work but i think there are weak links. the wifi unit has been pretty problematic so it would be nice if we could find something that would cause fewer headaches and provide better performance. i don't know the ins and outs of the GPU situation but if its possible it would be really good to have one that could make use of GL and GLES without having to always find workarounds for everything, but still be compatible to not have to rework everything already done. i don't actually know if there are better forthcoming options but that definitely seems to have held back some ports or some development. obviously any incremental changes in better spec ARM chips with NAND and RAM size should be made, provided it is also still compatible.
in terms of extra features, i don't think there is much universally useful to people that is a desperate must. i mean sure an accelerometer is nice and all but what will it be used for? a couple of games maybe? i just don't see it being a significant enough feature and i cant really fathom any situation beyond games that i would use it for. GPS could feasibly be more useful perhaps, could it make the pandora a car GPS device? i guess my biggest question is how good would it be crammed into the pandora and how expensive would it be? i have never gotten the impression it worked all that well on any phone, but happy to be proved wrong there. 3G is probably the most obvious add-on but the question is how. is there room for it in the hardware, is it something that would bring a whole lot of licencing and legal difficulties with it? if we were able to make the pandora a phone i would definitely think it was a great idea but if that is unlikely then people will have a phone anyway, they will likely be able to tether the pandora to it, and though i think it might be nice sometimes to be able to go online absolutely anywhere, there isnt much that i personally would want to be able to do that i couldn't do on a phone. i mean sure if people want to sit on IRC all day on their pandora's or be able to mess around with facebook or on forums or check train times or whatever else then cool, its useful but if you can do those things on a phone and the pandora cannot replace a phone, then i think its going to be niche enough that people can just tether or use a dongle.
anyway, that's my 2 cents, at least with regard to the pandora in this form factor. now if you said you wanted to make a gaming phone.... then no keyboard, 3G, capacitative, possibly a slider, etc etc, but then i don't think its going to be the device people go for when there are other such successful and popular phones out there and i just don't know if it would be worth it. maybe something modular would be good where you can use icontrolpad type attachments to a central capacitative slate unit would be good. make it a phone, make it open source (if possible with a phone) and make all the add-ons optional extras and maybe you would have something unique enough!
EDIT - dang that was longer than i realised!
, In which case, I think the most important questions are:
