Upon reading the OS update, I felt not even a slight twinge of concern regarding what the device will be like out-of-the-box. Why? Because I own other devices that rely heavily on open documentation and enthusiast communities:
The Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 - Sharp pretty much stopped developing for this and releasing updates right after it came out. However, a rich and vibrant community of Linux hackers kept this thing useable for so many years beyond any other PDA of its time period. I'm talking about drivers for CF add-on cards, newer OS distros, absolutely lovely and streamlined UIs for everything. I even wrote a front end to the NES emulator after the old front-end died of incompatibility with later OS versions. How similar was the Zaurus OS and community stuff to what we're going to see with the Pandora? My favorite OS was OpenZaurus... all the developers from OpenZaurus stopped work on it a couple years ago and built something called Angstrom. All the community stuff was web forum driven.
The Zipit Z2 - ZipitWireless built this device as a teen-oriented SMS and IM machine with few other features. They released what they needed to GPL-wise though, and it has a 300MHz ARM chip. Now there's things like
this, after hacking the Zipit gained some visible momentum / blog coverage in October. People have figured out *all* of the hardware stuff for these after-market distros, and have turned it into a neat, little, useful Linux palmtop.
The DeLorean DMC-12 - After producing only 3 model years, the DeLorean Motor Company went under. There are about five big parts vendors on-line, most of whom have invested quite a lot in development of new replacement parts or have sourced cross-reference parts. There are several huge, informative sites that document maintenance and upgrade procedures for every job on the car imaginable... often these guides contain photos, Q&A, forum threads, etc... to the point that this odd as hell vehicle from 1981 is easier to maintain than most things built in the 1990s at this point! All of the issues it had at release time were solved, sometimes repeatedly, until Internet use became common, at which point, solutions to all the release-time problems are solved, well documented, and available in multiple forms and flavors. Using easy instructions and inexpensive parts lists, I've made my door lock controller and my automatic transmission computer very stable... these were gauranteed failure parts, one of which was responsible for high battery drain.
The Pandora community will very shortly consists of 4000 owners of the device, all with a vested interest in it working beautifully... These are by definition, "early adopters," and therefore more actively into their toy purchases than average consumers. Additionally, some large percentage are going to be Linux hackers of some degree or another... I believe that, since I'm a little late on the delivery order (ordered in August 2009), I'll be benefitting from some OS improvements that are already published by other users / owners on the day I take mine out of the box!
