I applaud the idea, as it has entertained my thought as well for some time. However, I'm more of a fan of do it right the first time rather than get a product with the promise of improvement. I know that talking with these chinese manufacturers is a pain but there's probably a reason why the pandora is as expensive as it is. If I take this product at face value, it doesn't seem too different than a dingoo other than the faster cpu and a gpu. However, there's no promises on the software side so for the moment the faster cpu doesn't mean much. I mean, dingoo's already run older gen consoles decently and newer ones would probably need modifications on the software side to make use of the extra horse power (like the GPU) to make a big enough difference.
Still, I'm anxiously waiting to see if this turns out to be a great product. For the moment, though, this gave me an idea to burn some time. By now, most of you have probably heard of portable consoles (mods made by people of old consoles). If you haven't, a quick check at ben heck's forum or a youtube search of portable n64 will fill you up (keep in mind that as in everything involving modding there are some great ones and quite a bunch of duds). Anyhow, I thought about the possibility of using a cheap chinese 7" tablet, like the ones from Ainol that have an Allwinner A10 SOC. The reason for that is that they can be booted up from the micro-sd slot, have the sources for both the linux kernel available and Android ICS making them easily hack-able. With Android's recent support for USB gamepads and the tablets compatibility with USB-OTG, I think a custom made mod of these tablets to turn them into retro-gaming handhelds is pretty feasible and by the looks of it, cheap (but time-consuming). I'm pretty sure a custom version of Linux with GMenu2x can be mustered up in not a long amount of time making it a great device with (hopefully) multi-boot capabilities (dunno how hard it is to make it easily multi-bootable but firmware hacking is easy enough). Even better (though, this one is out of my reach as a programmer as I'm not really versed in kernel programming, but it's never late to try) would be the possibility of adapting Ubuntu's current work on making certain tablets have both linux and android running at the same time (duh, they both are linux) to allow for the possibility of both android apps and regular linux apps to execute having the best of both worlds.
Sure it's quirky, but I don't have loads of money to develop my own hardware (and these tablets can be had for around 100 usd and have 7" 800x480 regular screens or 1024x600 IPS ones for a few bucks more, with capacitive touch or resistive for a bit less, hdmi out, shoddy wifi which I wouldn't use anyway but is better than nothing and reasonably big batteries) and I'm kinda tired of having to wait for someone to come up with a good enough handheld (the pandora is pretty decent and, next to the caanoo, is about as good as it gets, but it tries to do too many things at once making it expensive and look clunky). That would probably resolve my woes of not having a good enough controller and/or the features I want. This wouldn't probably have pandora's performance in the more complex emulators given that AFAIK none of these chinese SOCs support NEON but I believe that thanks to the frequency the difference shouldn't be too high.
BTW, if you don't think that good quality cases can be made at home, do some research. Some portable-console guys have pretty good and cheap techniques to make alright cases (nothing fancy or really sturdy, but unique in their own way). And the hardware inside these tablets isn't that complex either, usually one L-shaped PCB covering about 30% of the surface and the rest is the battery and screen, I already did my research on that.
