Eds Status On The Pandora Os - Disheartening

[Harakiri23]

I'd like to calmly discuss the mood of the latest blog entry on the OP homepage.

I see quite a long list of "issues", even basic things (like H.264 playback, wlan) not yet finished - sorry that i didnt follow the project every day/week because this is all news to me.
But i have to wonder how somebody could ever claim to have a finished pandora game/mobile player platform at end of 2008 when not even the software/os/tools,
after 1.5 more years are completely finished.

What would have happened, when all the hardware, cases etc where done by end of 2008? A device would have been shipped with almost zero functionality
of its promised core functions, because software/drivers simply never existed yet.

Im not here to blame any developers itself (who probably do it all for free in their own free-time), only the OP company.
Either this was false promotion or background knowledge you needed to have, but i fully expected upon preorder that the device in 2008 would be
feature complete regarding its core functions. Emulation etc is something completely different which i didnt expect to work for most things at all.

Unforeseen things happen like paypal withdraw, manufacture issues with the chinese company etc, i would not lay blame on OP for such unforeseen things -
but the software and os can been foreseen and planned accordingly, which seems like it never happened.

Finally regarding these "facts" i like to address this piece,

but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple

is not how any company should ever talk to its customers who waited 1-2 years on a promised finished product.

I never had the feeling i was lied to, when i preordered on the first day and still havent till today received the device. Now however i think
its a big fat lie i was told for months and months that all the delay was only because of the hardware. Fact is, even with 100% finished functional
hardware - the pandora would now not be feature complete with its basic functionalities.

 

[joseluisjazz]

I just want to say one thing. If Evildragon doesn't know how to talk to customers, I'm from Uranus.

 

[TrashyMG]

I'd like to calmly discuss the mood of the latest blog entry on the OP homepage.

I see quite a long list of "issues", even basic things (like H.264 playback, wlan) not yet finished - sorry that i didnt follow the project every day/week because this is all news to me.
But i have to wonder how somebody could ever claim to have a finished pandora game/mobile player platform at end of 2008 when not even the software/os/tools,
after 1.5 more years are completely finished.

What would have happened, when all the hardware, cases etc where done by end of 2008? A device would have been shipped with almost zero functionality
of its promised core functions, because software/drivers simply never existed yet.

Im not here to blame any developers itself (who probably do it all for free in their own free-time), only the OP company.
Either this was false promotion or background knowledge you needed to have, but i fully expected upon preorder that the device in 2008 would be
feature complete regarding its core functions. Emulation etc is something completely different which i didnt expect to work for most things at all.

Unforeseen things happen like paypal withdraw, manufacture issues with the chinese company etc, i would not lay blame on OP for such unforeseen things -
but the software and os can been foreseen and planned accordingly, which seems like it never happened.

Finally regarding these "facts" i like to address this piece,

but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple

is not how any company should ever talk to its customers who waited 1-2 years on a promised finished product.

I never had the feeling i was lied to, when i preordered on the first day and still havent till today received the device. Now however i think
its a big fat lie i was told for months and months that all the delay was only because of the hardware. Fact is, even with 100% finished functional
hardware - the pandora would now not be feature complete with its basic functionalities.

Developers who can handle getting everything working like WLAN and such are hard to come by. They do it for free and have their normal jobs / life to deal with. Actually everyone who working on the Pandora has their normal jobs to deal with.. this should of been expected.

Personally I kind of like the opportunity to play with the software. To me getting things working is much more fun than actually playing the games themselves, but I'm a sick bastard..

They mentioned it several times they are not going to delay the Pandora for just some software issues.

 

[Jumpman]

This doesn't bother me, never has, and never will! THIS IS AN OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY PROJECT! The apple statement is exactly right! If your looking for perfection look somewhere else.

I don't even see this needing to be discussed! If anyone here has any other ideas in regards to how this device will function, they should indeed look at apple, nintendo, microsoft, dell ect.!


Chris

 

[Mithrildor]

1. All devs working on the software have a real-life and a real job, so they arent doing this 8 hours 5 days a week.
2. It took quite some time to give every dev working on the OS hardware.
3. ED has a real-life and real job too.
4. Its really alot of work building the OS for the Pandora

 

[emil10001]

I think that the general idea here was that the OS would ship in a fairly rough state, and then would be polished and fixed by the hundreds of developers that would get access to the hardware after it shipped. This was pretty clear to me from the beginning, and Craig had stated this early on a couple of times. I see nothing wrong with shipping a rough OS, because that can be improved on over time.

Also, we've seen video of most of the advertised features being used. It may not be all simple and glossy to do right now, and there will be some limitations initially, but I don't think that we've been lied to about the OS.

 

[clippa]

Some good points, well made. I'm assuming devs are like the rest of us, they knuckle down when they have deadlines, I'm assuming what with the deadline constantly shifting further and further away, there's been no need to get a wriggle on

 

[foft]

Sounds to me like it all works pretty well, just needs some optimisation/clean up. It is a hacker device remember. In some ways its disappointing that so MUCH has been done already since the fun of these things is fixing stuff in the early days...

I seem to remember the dev hardware booting Linux last year. Things are much more polished now but it could have been shipped with a variant of that. Would be enough to do 2D framebuffer emulation which is a large amount of use the GP32/GP2X got.

Edit: Also wanted to add:
i) Its already MUCH better than GP2X OS (after years!)
ii)It has XMMS which is a better music player than my N900 has and that's from Nokia! I'm using the xterm and mplayer to play tunes on the N900...

 

[mindlord]

I still feel the whole problem - all the delays were stemmed from the fact that the Bank SCREWED OpenPandora Ltd. It forced the project to go from "We have all the money, right now, up-front, here it is, let's roll!" to "We will have some of the money in February 2009, and a bit more trickling in here and there. Not to mention they lost a load when the nub developer went belly-up. I'm sure OP Ltd, had every intention of paying for help with the drivers and such. Instead it was strictly volunteer work done by kind people in their spare time when they were not at their day jobs. Things slowed to a crawl because the money wasn't immediately available like they hoped it would be.

 

[Caine]

The fact that the OS would have shipped in a very crude fashion in 2008 / beginning 2009 was known to even before ordering became available. It has been posted, just not advertised at large (a mistake perhaps).

For many developers, tinkering with the device was/is a selling point. Also, had hardware gotten out (sooner) there would have been a great many more people developing software and tweaking the OS.

 

[Pleng]

To be honest I don't think anybody here was expecting H.264 playback on day one.

WLan is a bit of a disappointment but hopefully it should work itself out soon. Other than that the OS looks to be in pretty good shape.

I can't help but feel, however, that the OP are going to be a little disappointed on just how few pre-orderes are actually going to help out with the OS. I kinda get the impression that any body who wants to help out with the OS is already doing so.

There are a lot of people who want to mess around with OTHER OS and tinker with their particular set-ups but I don't think they're going to be much use to the core OS development.

I guess that most the people who pre-ordered are either software (but not OS) developers, or people who just want to play!

If there had been 40,000 units sold it might be safe to expect a large enough user base to have people developing the OS for free. With a sample as small as 4000 it's a risky strategy.

Still, it looks to me like the OS is in a decent enough state to begin with; which is pretty lucky!


EDIT!:
On the WLAN issue.... would sticking in a USB WLan stick which works under normal (ARM) Linux distros provide an interim solution? Or is the issue lower level than that?

 

[Aimless_E]

I still wonder how slow, slow is, are we talking 11mbs apposed to 54mbs or are you talking about 1mbs speeds?

I'm not surprised about the video problems the power-vr drivers are relatively new to the Linux community so issues like this are to be expected. Im sure that everyone that makes games/programs for the Pandora will run into similar problems.

All that to say, They still have 3+ weeks before they can ship them out. They still have time to sort out the problems. Lets be patient and wait so see how it all unfolds.

 

[WizardStan]

But i have to wonder how somebody could ever claim to have a finished pandora game/mobile player platform at end of 2008 when not even the software/os/tools,
after 1.5 more years are completely finished.

At the time of preorder, when it was expected to be Christmas 2008, we were told a LOT of things weren't working. There was no working WiFi. The 3D driver wasn't integrated. Yeah, a lot of things needed a lot of work, and were told that we'd be getting the hardware without a complete OS, but they hoped to have basic things working before too long. And then they opened the pre-order flood gates and nearly 4000 of these expected incomplete (software wise) devices were ordered.
A year and a half later, we've got working audio, working wifi (even if it isn't optimal), working 3D, libPND, three built in choices for an environment. In short, when we ordered, we were told the OS would need a lot of work to be usable, and we were OK with that. Now the OS is a lot more stable. Still a few things to tweak, but nothing defeating like missing audio and 3D, or wifi. All the good stuff is there in some form, it just needs to be tightened.

I never had the feeling i was lied to, when i preordered on the first day and still havent till today received the device. Now however i think
its a big fat lie i was told for months and months that all the delay was only because of the hardware. Fact is, even with 100% finished functional
hardware - the pandora would now not be feature complete with its basic functionalities.

You were mistaken if you ever thought the Pandora OS was going to be complete. Even recently, EvilDragon is on record as saying the OS will never be "complete", which is exactly as it should be. The PSP gets regular firmware updates that add new functionality every so often, and they're a giant corporation. The first few upgrades didn't just add new features, but fixed problems with old ones. If Sony can't get it right the first time, why would you expect a couple of guys working out of their garage to be perfect from the start?

 

[WizardStan]

I can't help but feel, however, that the OP are going to be a little disappointed on just how few pre-orderes are actually going to help out with the OS. I kinda get the impression that any body who wants to help out with the OS is already doing so.

Actually, I get a little tinge of disappointment every time I hear about such-and-such problem being solved, or port XYZ working. I was genuinely looking forward to a partially incomplete system, getting my meat hooks into the code and helping. Every delay is just that much longer that those with dev boards have to fix the things that I could have helped with as well.
That's why I laid claim to the Intellivision emulator as soon as I could. My port. MINE! No touchy. h34r:

 

[Viral18]

ED's post was honest about the flaws of the OS in it's current state. This isn't so much an admittance of amateurism -more, being honest about the issues that most other companies including the 'big names' of OS's usually just cover up until a patch is released :s I don't think I've ever had a new OS that fully runs everything it should do- and besides, as first-batchers, we are in a sense beta testers to the project before a more commercial release in the second batch etc. Not that I mind pessimistic conversation- I love pessimism

 

[gaterooze]

Harakiri, while your points may be valid I think you may have misinterpreted the entire Pandora project... ED is exactly right in telling people to go buy an Apple if those are their expectations. The Pandora is not for them, and it never set out to be. Anyone who has used a GP32 or GP2X close to launch will know that the Pandora is actually ahead of the eight-ball here. The expectation is, and always has been, that once the community gets their hands on units, there will be an explosion of progress on the software front. You may have everything you want within a few weeks of release. That's how it works here, so enjoy the ride.

 

[Trevsweb]

i tihnk everyone has done an excellent job so far.

i dont think i could blind code system drivers before getting a dev unit... even if i could code them.
when everyone that needs one gets a final unit you will see that list disapear.quicker than you can say whats your order number...

 

[atomicthumbs]

Why If I Have To Re-Encode All My Videos To Play Them On My Pandora I Might Just Cancel My Order. Its Just Too Much Effort To Enjoy My Funny Videos Of People Hurting Themselves While I'm On The Bus.

Edit:

In Fact I Might Just Buy An Ipad Because It's Certainly Going To Be More Capable And Fun For Gaming Than The "Pandora" Because It's Made By A Company With A History Of Making Products.

 

[Pleng]

I was genuinely looking forward to a partially incomplete system, getting my meat hooks into the code and helping.

I didn't say that there was nobody who wanted to help with the OS. Indeed I'm sure we're all glad that there are people such as yourself who are planning on helping, I certainly am! I simply think that the team might be overestimating the amount of you good guys that are in the first batch.

I, for one, have diddly-squat to offer, OS wise.

 

[Qwertyuiop]

I still wonder how slow, slow is, are we talking 11mbs apposed to 54mbs or are you talking about 1mbs speeds?

ED answered that in the other thread-

I'm confused about the WiFi

They say 'without using SDIO it was SLOW'

Then they talk about 1200Kbs. Then they seem to imply that wifi may or may not work when system ships. Does that mean they won't be including any driver at all if they can't get a 'fast' driver working? 1200Kbs is plenty fast for my needs!

Sorry, my fault... it should be 1200bps approx
So REALLY slow.

The driver will still be on the system, yes. Maybe it will even be working fully upon release. This is definately one thing we (or better: DJWillis) is hardest working on. But he's got very little time at the moment.