Since they are entirely redesigning XGP and XGP Mini I doubt they'll hit their goal to launch those 2 machines late this year or early next year-- it should take more time than that to pick the SoC, design the shell and PCB, select a display, control method, and put together a good custom Linux distro (or have someone else put it together. Hopefully not Dignsys. :lol: ) Internal accessories like WiFi and TV tuners should be able to connect by fairly simple means to the SoC and shouldn't require That said I can't imagine it not being ready to roll sometime next year. There isn't that much engineering to do with an SoC at the center of the machine.
It wouldn't bother me THAT much if the full XGP used a 480x272 display and analog stick. From their responses it sounds more likely they go to a D-Pad, as for a 4:3 dispay, who knows. I'd love for them to go with my recommended chipset (S3C2460) for the extra features (mostly FPU/VP and lower power consumption than VRender-3D) .. but VR3D wouldn't be too shabby either.
Honestly, the GP2X is a great little machine-- it just really let me down in 3 areas. The 2D blitter provides extremely little acceleration, so the CPU is stuck with all my heavy drawing operations, which I know any design of the XGP will fix .. the miserable stick which the XGP will fix in some form or fashion .. and the low build quality (headphone jack fell off into the unit, and 2 caps, as well..) which if they test the unit at all before they ship out a thousand of them, should be improved...
I just don't really expect GPH to fix any of those faults anymore. The bit about 2D Acceleration they'd need a new SoC to correct, and GPH doesn't really care, apparently. They think people watch movies and listen to music on here, and nothing else. They'd rather sell off all their essentially-broken hardware before trying to fix the stick issue, claiming they can't afford to add D-Pads when they can afford to design weird new BoBs that a minority of their customers will actually buy or releasing weird-colored versions of their hardware (all silver? What the hell?)
Their SoC manufacturer 'broke' SD-DMA and can't seem to fix it, so they just released the MMSP2 faulty. As a result loading anything from the SD card bogs down the 920T CPU so much it can't do anything. GPH accepted this apparently, but don't seem to even have been cognizant of how the 2D blitter worked, or how media decoding on the MMSP2 worked, and just accepted MagicEyes' reference design for a MMSP2-based PMP as-is, resulting in them also accepting their shitty selection for a video scaler and TV-Out chip that suck more power than the rest of the system combined, and drag battery life through the floor during use. They mounted the stick in the wrong orientation (How do you manage that? It boggles the mind) and I'm hearing reports the screen is even mounted the wrong way in MK2 units.
I wasn't around in the GP32 days but from what I've seen, there were not these catastrophic problems; with the exception of the backlight/frontlight mini-fiasco things went over pretty smoothly. What we honestly seem to need is GP's execution of GPH's idea in a more carefully thought-out fashion-- because GPH hasn't proven themselves to be a competent company in any regard. And since GP's cleared up that GPH did NOT leave because they wanted to make an open-source system and GP didn't, it's hard to think of them as the oppressed little-guy anymore.