And would the compatability would be a worthwhile trade-off? There are more classic PC games than there are classic console games from all consoles COMBINED! The market for this product if it could play PC games would sky-rocket... so unless it would cut the 10 hour lifespan to say 2 hours, I would have thought this would make a great deal of sense.
That is precisely the sort of thing it would do. x86 is generally not all that power-efficient, which is why people don't put it in telephones and portable devices for the most part. I'm told it's improving, but it was never designed for the embedded space in the first place, and it may well always be behind what ARM and the like are capable of.
Bear in mind also that the games to which you refer are not optimised for use on power-efficient devices, either. The Pandora, as it is, is leveraging many, many years' worth of software (if we only look back as far as the GP32, that's almost a decade of stuff) made for ARM processors and the like.
I had no idea that there were that many classic Microsoft DOS and Microsoft Windows games. It's not a field of interest to me, admittedly.
I'm pretty sure there are many thousands of classic console and home-computer games, though, quite a number of them dating to even before I was born. :lol:
I must admit, I'm not one for mobile phone technology myself, but it's what the masses want and I'm sure there are people out there who would buy this instantly if it could replace their Smartphone. Honestly I thinking more about improvements that would make it more marketable with this one, rather than something I personally would use, but to be fair, if you're willing to spend £300+ for a Pandora, I doubt it would cost that much more to stick in a SIM-Card reader and a few componants... a cheap phone costs £10 or less now... and you could always not use that feature.
It's not just "a SIM reader and a few components" as far as I understand it, though - it would make for quite the hefty redesign, and all the testing that goes with it, as well, which doesn't come at zero cost, and there are also many differing global standards to contend with as well, which means you would have those costs for each regional version that would have to be made, too.
As for not using it, it's still there creating extra weight and quite likely eating battery life.
I'm pretty sure that a device like the Pandora will never be in line with the proverbial masses anyway, though.
Honestly. I'm just throwing ideas out there. Perhaps it's the novelty, but discovering the Pandora, especially knowing it's made by a small independent group, makes me really want to see it succeed commercially. People who make a quality product deserve to succeed, and these ideas are basically what I would want to see in the next as I feel it would make it the definitive hand held device...
Oh, I quite agree. To be honest I'm just enjoying discussing stuff.
But if you look around the forum, the attention of the team appears to be on future OMAP SoCs at this time.
but if this Pandora 2 was released and you're not a fan of x86 processors and mobile phones, you could always stick with the original Pandora. It's not like the community would drop it, they seem vervently proud of it (I'm glad to see).
What I mean is, there are already devices out there for people that want x86 devices, Microsoft Windows devices, and mobile telephones.
If the Pandora was one of them, I would never have bothered. Maybe I'm alone in that, but maybe I'm not. :lol:
