Geeks with Wives Podcast and Open Pandora coverage

[Link]

^


Between DragonBox.de, the local shop or two in Germany, the Paris shop, and Ithic.com's website, practically anyone in the world has access to In-Stock & Ready to ship Open Pandora units. That's retail enough for me, as the intention never was to find the Open Pandora at Target or GameStop or anywhere in between. Correct me if I'm wrong here.


Also, more feedback from the community, and especially developers to the 5 questions above would be appreciated.

 

[_wb_]

1. What is the intended goal of the OP?


2. How much time was spent in development?


3. What has been the feedback from potential buyers?


4. Discuss the development community and their involvement in future expansions.


5. When will it hit retail?

These are my personal opinions, and since I only first heard about the OP project about one year ago, I don't know if I should even try to answer them.


1. To create an open handheld device that can be used both as a handheld game console AND as a mini-laptop, with no "chains" limiting what you can do with it.


2. (not for me to answer, but I guess longer than originally planned, and amazing that the OPT actually succeeded)


3. Depending on who I show it to, reactions range from "Wow, that is a TINY laptop" and "What linux distro are you running?" to "Can you make phone calls with it?" and "My smartphone is more powerful". About the price: some people consider it to be expensive ("my phone is cheaper, looks nicer and can do more"), others consider it to be relatively cheap ("my laptop is more expensive, has worse battery life and is harder to carry around").


4. Given the size of the Pandora community (~5000 Pandora owners), the dev community is relatively huge (probably ~100 devs). There are >700 PNDs on the repo at the moment, many of them are high-quality software. The Pandora attracts devs from many other communities: of course Free Software / Open Source enthusiasts, but also people who like to make homebrew stuff on other hardware but get tired of how they have to fight against chains created by companies like Sony, indie game devs, people who are new to programming and veterans with 30 or more years of experience in hobby coding, people who are new to GNU/Linux and die-hard GNU/Linux experts, assembly hackers and Python programmers, etc. So unlike many commercial game consoles, there will never be something like "the final game" for the Pandora, and nothing new will ever come out after that one. There will always be more to come, just like there are still people doing new stuff (in 2012!) for, say, the Commodore 64. That's the advantage of an open platform with a nice dev ecosystem. Moreover, the Pandora is the first and at this moment still the ONLY handheld device for which it is possible to code on the device itself, without needing any auxiliary hardware. In my opinion, this is what makes it so very unique.


5. It has already.

 

[Fzero]

So this is happening in about 7 and a half hours time, by which I should be in the middle of my second dream [around 4am]


I trust this will be available to d/l on MP3 after, officially, if not will someone here be recording it?


I'd really like to listen but as it is a weekday I cannot sit up till then, got to get up a couple hours later for work...

 

[FaeMinx]

^ +1

 

[Fzero]

Ok looks like we good Fae...


this page is there's right?


http://geekswithwives.com/category/podcasts/#&panel1-2


Just hope they up their podcast recordings quick after doing them, I'd like to listen to this when driving home from work tomorrow night - though that might be a bit wishful thinking, giving them just a few hours to make it available online

 

[Link]

The review will be up Thursday, it's positive.


The podcast will be available Friday.


Really nice guys, super positive, tried to do my best and hope it all sounds good after some editing. Nervous to see how it all comes out of the wash.

 

[Fzero]

Good stuff, look forward to listening

 

[ekianjo]

^


Between DragonBox.de, the local shop or two in Germany, the Paris shop, and Ithic.com's website, practically anyone in the world has access to In-Stock & Ready to ship Open Pandora units. That's retail enough for me, as the intention never was to find the Open Pandora at Target or GameStop or anywhere in between. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

Well, that's very light to say "retail" but yeah, sure, it qualifies. Without talking about having the Pandora at Target or Gamestop, it would have been great to have way more support from small, independent shops in different countries. This has never happened, making the Pandora literally invisible to potential customers who do not type "open Pandora" in Google. I'm a geek as much as everyone else here, and that's just because one of my friends told me about the OP that I discovered it. Seriously, there is zero awareness out there, whether on the retail or on the internet.


ANyway, it is welcome to have a podcast talking about the Pandora. This will bring some more awareness, and we never have enough of that at this stage.

 

[Link]

Well, that's very light to say "retail" but yeah, sure, it qualifies. Without talking about having the Pandora at Target or Gamestop, it would have been great to have way more support from small, independent shops in different countries. This has never happened, making the Pandora literally invisible to potential customers who do not type "open Pandora" in Google.

I think that would have been the case if there would have been a production that was stable once it started. It seems everytime momentum would be built up, something would come along and there would be no units for months in the beginning.


Your point is valid, but up until June/July timeframe we didn't have stable production numbers to perpetuate sales beyond ED/Craig/(recently)myself. Then when the 1GHz news hit, sales slumped, and then when the drama ensued, things really never got back to what they were in July until the past two or three weeks, when I was finally able to get 1GHz units to have in stock.


I don't see how you can have the OP at many small independently owned shops around the world while there has been no excess units sitting around until recently. You can't have hundreds of units sitting in warehouses or on shelves when you owe people hundreds of units from 2008-2011. This is why the Pandora never made it to "retail".

 

[Link]

http://geekswithwives.com/2012/12/review-open-pandora/

 

[Fzero]

cheers, little sneak preview to his thoughts on Pandora, sounds about right too

 

[ekianjo]

I don't see how you can have the OP at many small independently owned shops around the world while there has been no excess units sitting around until recently.

Yeah, totally agree with you here. There is fundamental supply problem that will prevent the Pandora from reaching the next step in distribution. Let's say if tomorrow a very popular website talks about the Pandora and you get 1000 orders at once, it would be months until every order gets it delivered, most probably. The current production does not scale well (and I doubt ED would be able to handle way more orders if he works alone on this).


Anyway, for the Pandora 1 it may be too late to expect much to happen to fix the current situation, but over time a price drop would certainly go far to sell more units.

 

[Link]

^


Spot on. I don't think it would be months, just until Global Components can give us time in their schedule. Seems like they've been flexible so far to accommodate the project, and they care.

 

[WizardStan]

That's what I call balanced reporting: some problems, high cost, not for everybody, but perfect for some people. Good review.

 

[elwing]

yes, good review, trough I'dd have liked it longer with more photo video and goodies

 

[klapse]

Their definition of "competitive" devices includes things like the Ipad, which does not feature gaming controls. It would have been more accurate to say "for this set of features there currently is NO competition".


Let's add some comments to the article.

 

[Link]

I thought that too, but didn't want to bust up the review. I suggest comments +1


Just gave this a listen... Not happy with some of my responses. I'll blame Craig for my confusion, as I just finished reading his "shit show" in the news section right before I got on the air. My head was not in the most positive Pandora light, and I apologize for my lack of enthusiasm. "Never let them see you sweat." Well I hear it with my poor dialogue.

 

[2bit]

Believe it or not there are actually quite a few retro gamers in my area who while at the local retro gaming store I have advertised / showed off my pandora to which they've responded by either saying that they knew what it was but quit following after the whole circuit co disaster .

 

[ekianjo]

Just gave this a listen... Not happy with some of my responses. I'll blame Craig for my confusion, as I just finished reading his "shit show" in the news section right before I got on the air. My head was not in the most positive Pandora light, and I apologize for my lack of enthusiasm. "Never let them see you sweat." Well I hear it with my poor dialogue.

It wasn't bad, I think. It's nice to put a voice on "Link", by the way You sure did not sound very enthusiastic, however, and that's just bad timing if you saw the thread you mentioned just before going on air.

 

[ekianjo]

By the way, it would be cool to hear if you get some feedback on your talk + if sales went up after it went on air or not. Just to measure the impact of it.