I've owned four different Pandoras over the years. Faulty, faulty, traded, retained. Three were CC, the last and current is a 1GHz. All of them have given me the exact same experience with the nubs. They are god awful.
When they work, they work well. An innovative solution to the need for analogue sticks no doubt. But I don't think they've ever worked broadly as they should for more than forty percent of the time. The rest of the time one will loose half its movement (can't go into the minus in x dimension, for example), or will have a sort of kink in their movement which makes diagonals infuriatingly slow. The latter is so common I'm suprised when it doesn't happen during a session.
Example; When playing Black Shades it will randomly become really sluggish to look around in one direction. I have to wiggle it back & forth to fix it. Another example; I can almost never reliably use the nubs as a mouse on the desktop.
As I said its been the same for all the Pandoras I've owned. I know the rotate-them-ten-times-and-back-again trick. Sometimes it works. Sometime I have to turn it off and on again then do the bloody trick anyway. I know to push down on the plastic around the nubs, not that it does anything that I've been able to tell.
Have I been extraordinarily unlucky? Should I send it back for new nubs? Or is, as I suspect, this a fatal weakness in the Pandora's design? If its the latter, can anything be done to get around it to some degree?
P.S. I hope they'll use something else entirely if there's a Pandora 2. I have no interest in fighting the nubs when emulating mouse-driven PC games.
P.P.S. Oh look, in the time it took to write this post the right nub has gone tits up, only recognising about one third of the total range of theoretical movement. That's pretty severe, but not entirely unusual. So bear with me while I get the stylus out to hit 'Post'.
When they work, they work well. An innovative solution to the need for analogue sticks no doubt. But I don't think they've ever worked broadly as they should for more than forty percent of the time. The rest of the time one will loose half its movement (can't go into the minus in x dimension, for example), or will have a sort of kink in their movement which makes diagonals infuriatingly slow. The latter is so common I'm suprised when it doesn't happen during a session.
Example; When playing Black Shades it will randomly become really sluggish to look around in one direction. I have to wiggle it back & forth to fix it. Another example; I can almost never reliably use the nubs as a mouse on the desktop.
As I said its been the same for all the Pandoras I've owned. I know the rotate-them-ten-times-and-back-again trick. Sometimes it works. Sometime I have to turn it off and on again then do the bloody trick anyway. I know to push down on the plastic around the nubs, not that it does anything that I've been able to tell.
Have I been extraordinarily unlucky? Should I send it back for new nubs? Or is, as I suspect, this a fatal weakness in the Pandora's design? If its the latter, can anything be done to get around it to some degree?
P.S. I hope they'll use something else entirely if there's a Pandora 2. I have no interest in fighting the nubs when emulating mouse-driven PC games.
P.P.S. Oh look, in the time it took to write this post the right nub has gone tits up, only recognising about one third of the total range of theoretical movement. That's pretty severe, but not entirely unusual. So bear with me while I get the stylus out to hit 'Post'.
