Haven't Been Here For A Loooong Time !

[ljones]

Hello all !

I haven't visited these forums (nor the GP2X website) all that much, so the pandora is pretty new to me. I've just been reading the FAQ and seen the rendered picture. The pandora looks very nice but I do have some thoughts and questions.

First of all I'd like to say I also own a GP2X but almost since I bought it, it has been lying in its box - unused. But anyways onto the pandora.

It certianly looks intresting but apon seeing the rendered picture here ( http://openpandora.org/bigone.jpg ) the first thought that struck me is about the keyboard. That space "bar" key reminds me of the ZX Spectrum! But what I'm wondering is the way in which the number keys have all been pushed to the back of the case. Won't that make it more fiddly to press those buttons?

Also what are the physical dimensions of the pandora? Is it closer to being the size of a blackberry, or closer to the size of a VHS tape?

The 2 SD card slots look intresting and unless the pandora is going to be very slow at I/O operations it would make it very handy for moving data from one card to another. It would help (for example) if you had a digital camera and needed to make space to take more photos; just drop off the pictures from (say) a 1GB SD to a 4GB SD (most digital cameras I've seen don't support anything much more than a 1GB SD).

Also I hope the hinge used in the centre of the screen connecting it to the pandora's keyboard is reliable. Hopefully there won't be any reliability problems as found on the Psion 5MX whereby the screen flexi cable eventually breaks.

Will the pandora have either a microphone or line input at all? If it does, could that (over wlan) potentially open up the usage of VOIP?

Finally I read that the pandora is limited to 128MB and is unexpandable. If that's the case what will it use to browse the 'net with? I'd have thought firefox on 128MB would be painfully slow -- surely they'd need to use a smaller browser (maybe something like "netsurf"; http://www.netsurf-browser.org/ ) .

ljones

 

[Sphinxter]

Welcome back.

 

[Esn]

Also what are the physical dimensions of the pandora? Is it closer to being the size of a blackberry, or closer to the size of a VHS tape?

One of these pictures is on the front page of the official website, even.

 

[bigtruck]

To answer the questions I know the answers to:

1. The Pandora's dimensions are 140 x 83 x 27 mm. This is between the size of the original Nintendo DS and the DS Lite.
2. I'll agree that the numbers' location might make it annoying when typing. The benefit, however, is that the numbers can be easily used as extra buttons when playing games.
3. The Pandora has an internal microphone, and it was announced relatively recently that it has line-in/out. VoIP should be possible, but if you're thinking Skype specifically that probably won't run on the Pandora.
4. Yes, the Pandora has 128MB RAM, soldered onto the SoC and non-expandable. From what I've heard, an optimized build of Firefox should run fine on the Pandora.

 

[ljones]

Welcome back.

Thanks for that.

Just looking at the other replies, I didn't spot one of those pictures (the woman holding the pandora). The physical size of the thing - 140x83x27 mm makes it only slightly larger than a blackberry! That sure looks intresting and although I'm not expecting full-blown desktop PC performance from the pandora carrying a pandora about would beat lugging 'round a full sized laptop any day!

I forgot to add one thing to my post above - d'oh! I read in the FAQ that the pandora will have a 4000mAh lithium battery. Though I wonder what "type" is battery will be -- will it use some sort of battery that you can find on ebay for many other small devices and which can be bought already for low cost or will it be some sort of weird propietary mobile phone-esque battery that costs a fortune? A Pity it won't use plain old fashioned AA Batteries; if whoever (is it GP?) makes the pandora vanishes in a couple of years' time (e.g. gets sued, bankrupt, bought out/taken over) that'll mean no new batteries and from memory usually batteries don't have *that* long a lifespan before they won't hold a charge any more.

The line in sounds intresting and so does the internal mic. In theroy it should then be possible to use the pandora as a high quality digital audio recorder (i.e. 44.1Khz stereo, as on normal PCs?). If that's the case, I'd find that *very* useful. Even better if it could record directly into mp3's or ogg's.

One thing I certianly do like in the FAQ is the statement that a full blown desktop GUI is on the cards. If that's the case I guess the best thing to do would be to buy a small USB mouse for the pandora, as trying to navigate around using the pads won't be much fun -- imagine replacing your desktop PC's mouse with a joystick x.x !

ljones

 

[gaterooze]

But what I'm wondering is the way in which the number keys have all been pushed to the back of the case. Won't that make it more fiddly to press those buttons?

This is to accomodate the gaming controls in a more ergonomic position. Think of the numbers like the old Function keys on an Amiga

QUOTE
Also what are the physical dimensions of the pandora? Is it closer to being the size of a blackberry, or closer to the size of a VHS tape?


A hair smaller than the original Nintendo DS, a bit bigger than the DS lite.

QUOTE
Will the pandora have either a microphone or line input at all? If it does, could that (over wlan) potentially open up the usage of VOIP?


Yep, yep, and quite possibly.

QUOTE
Finally I read that the pandora is limited to 128MB and is unexpandable. If that's the case what will it use to browse the 'net with? I'd have thought firefox on 128MB would be painfully slow


Nope, the devs have already seen Firefox 3 running on this chip with 128mb of ram and even with dozens of tabs open it reportedly ran blazingly fast and wasn't maxing out the ram. You can't equate desktop RAM with RAM in a device like this.

will it use some sort of battery that you can find on ebay for many other small devices and which can be bought already for low cost

From what we've heard, yes. edit: sorry, that's old information, as other posters noted.

QUOTE
If that's the case I guess the best thing to do would be to buy a small USB mouse for the pandora, as trying to navigate around using the pads won't be much fun -- imagine replacing your desktop PC's mouse with a joystick x.x !


It also has a touch screen

 

[x68000]

The system will use a propietary battery specifically developed for use with the pandora. As for the manufacturer, it is being developed by many of the forum members, including mweston, evildragon, squidge, fatih (amongst others) and craigix is heading up the manufacturing (gbax.com)

 

[bigtruck]

Unfortunately, the battery is a non-standard one which will likely be difficult to find replacements for. I believe there was a poll a while back, most people voted in favor of a higher capacity battery instead of an easily replaceable one. There have been rumors of selling a 5000mAh extended life replacement battery. Personally, I'm rather happy it doesn't use standard AA batteries. That was one of my major grievances with the gp2x. It makes charging much simpler: I don't need a seperate charger, I can just plug it in directly to any AC outlet or USB port and charge while I'm playing.

On a side note, the Pandora developers are not associated with GP or GPH, except for some of them being regional distributors for those companies' products. I'm not sure if they have an official company yet or not. In a way, it seems to me to be a bit of a throwback to the old days of computers being built out of someone's garage. I rather prefer it that way, knowing that there are actual people involved, not some faceless corporation.

 

[ljones]

Uh oh....that battery dosen't sound too good. Still wondering what happens once it eventually won't hold its charge - not so good. Hopefully there will be some other way of powering the unit or modifying it.

One other quick question - will the pandora have any sort of VGA output or will it be stuck with an awful SVHS output? SVHS looks *bad* on a TV; normal TVs are low resolution devices - I mean even my old C64 which output 320x200 looked awful on a TV 20 odd years ago.

That touch screen sounds impressive though -- at least you won't have to use the touch screen to type though (a la the iphone) - at least the pandora has a keyboard of sorts. A screen is a singularly bad device for trying to type on, touch sensitive or not!

ljones

 

[WizardStan]

Research suggests that batteries stored at 40% charge last significantly longer than those kept at a constant 100% charge. 4% loss per year vs 20% loss per year at normal temperatures.
I propose a tool, called "batterystore" or something like that (I'm bad with names) which, when active, will drain the battery to 40%, and prevent the battery from charging beyond 40%. 40% is still about 4 hours play time, so if you regularly only use it for short trips (an hour or two), you can use the app to keep the battery at 40% and therefore fresher, but if you're needing longer life, just kill the app and fully charge.

Regarding the output, I don't know what SVHS is, but the output is S-Video which puts the max resolution at around 720x480. Provided the Pandora handles the video out at native resolution and doesn't need to scale, it should look pretty good on both standard and high def screens. If, however, the only resolution it can do is 800x480, and then needs to scale that down to 720x480 (or even worse, 512x480) then it'll come out a little fuzzy regardless of what TV it's displayed on. This is still a concern of mine that I've not seen addressed.

 

[ljones]

My mistake!! I meant S-Video, not SVHS. D'oh !

ljones

 

[quadomatic]

Why wouldn't Skype be likely? They even have Skype on iPhone (unofficially btw)! Fring supports Skype and a bunch of other services and is made for so many different cellphones, and Linux.

And there is Skype for Linux right? But that's not skype for ARM is it...

 

[God Ginrai]

Why wouldn't Skype be likely? They even have Skype on iPhone (unofficially btw)! Fring supports Skype and a bunch of other services and is made for so many different cellphones, and Linux.

And there is Skype for Linux right? But that's not skype for ARM is it...

IIRC, it's because Skype isn't open source.

-God Ginrai

 

[craigix]

The battery claim on devices such as this is interesting.

Most battery manufacturers will keep batteries of almost all sizes in stock, they go from 2x2x2 and up to huge sizes due to all the devices available these days and also to power any device which in theory might come to the market so the manufacturers can get one off the shelf.

For them it is just a case of making a bag to fit.

There is a standard battery of about 3200 which will fit the pandora, we just wanted to max the space and had one made which is (as far as i remember) 2mm smaller than one which can be bought off the shelf.

It really isn't the major issue some people think it is, well at least not now we live in a world of weird sized batteries being in everything these days.

Also some people think devices like the Gizmondo or the Zodiac take a custom battery but I'd bet if you get a stock listing from a huge battery manufacturer you will find it is in fact an off the shelf part, or at least within one mm of one.

A custom connection can, again, probably be bought in the same way.

Don't fear the battery!

 

[jmetal88]

The battery claim on devices such as this is interesting.

Most battery manufacturers will keep batteries of almost all sizes in stock, they go from 2x2x2 and up to huge sizes due to all the devices available these days and also to power any device which in theory might come to the market so the manufacturers can get one off the shelf.

For them it is just a case of making a bag to fit.

There is a standard battery of about 3200 which will fit the pandora, we just wanted to max the space and had one made which is (as far as i remember) 2mm smaller than one which can be bought off the shelf.

It really isn't the major issue some people think it is, well at least not now we live in a world of weird sized batteries being in everything these days.

Also some people think devices like the Gizmondo or the Zodiac take a custom battery but I'd bet if you get a stock listing from a huge battery manufacturer you will find it is in fact an off the shelf part, or at least within one mm of one.

A custom connection can, again, probably be bought in the same way.

Don't fear the battery!

Excellent post! In the same manner, I will always be able to buy replacement NiCad cells for my Sony Betamovie battery.

 

[God Ginrai]

The battery claim on devices such as this is interesting.

Most battery manufacturers will keep batteries of almost all sizes in stock, they go from 2x2x2 and up to huge sizes due to all the devices available these days and also to power any device which in theory might come to the market so the manufacturers can get one off the shelf.

For them it is just a case of making a bag to fit.

There is a standard battery of about 3200 which will fit the pandora, we just wanted to max the space and had one made which is (as far as i remember) 2mm smaller than one which can be bought off the shelf.

It really isn't the major issue some people think it is, well at least not now we live in a world of weird sized batteries being in everything these days.

Also some people think devices like the Gizmondo or the Zodiac take a custom battery but I'd bet if you get a stock listing from a huge battery manufacturer you will find it is in fact an off the shelf part, or at least within one mm of one.

A custom connection can, again, probably be bought in the same way.

Don't fear the battery!

So this other battery will fit in the case? I'm just wondering, because I'd like to know how this will work out.

-God Ginrai

 

[Chip]

So this other battery will fit in the case? I'm just wondering, because I'd like to know how this will work out.

It certainly looks that way:

There is a standard battery of about 3200 which will fit the pandora

Even if this particular battery is no longer available in 5 or 6 years when you might need one, chances are something similar will be. Worst case scenario, you can always roll your own. As far as I'm concerned, the custom battery is a non-issue.

 

[mraellis]

I am also checking here for the first time in ages thanks to the Pandora.

Thanks for asking the questions i was going to ask as it saves asking.

The only thing i can really say is that if the psp and the; BlackBerry RIM, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian S60 and J2ME Phones can ALL do Skype then so can the Pandora.

It just may take time.

That though as now made my attention jump up a bit more as Games, music, and videos on a psp beater (hardware wise) was already cool but it being a phone as well as me hooked.

Now i just need to know the home-brew scene will beat the gp2x's one and that it's relatively easy to port to and code for.

Also it should be able to but to be 100% sure...

Would the Pandora be capable of downloading files off websites or utorrent etc so that we could then play the files straight away without having to (like the psp) plug it into a pc and move to to the right place.

Also would kind of video files would it be able to play. Would it be limited or a case of most work. Such as mp4, ALL avi's, divx ,xvid, 3gp (would that be possible?), rmvb? (that one makes me think no), mov (a no?) or mpeg etc.

Same question for audio really. Would program specific ones work such as Wma work etc? I guess they should since most if not all codecs are available now.

I am guessing they all should work if people get them to, since this is basically a mini pc. But i had to check.

Another question now i am started...

Would be be able to play something like Warcraft 2 multi-player?

Or even anything multi-player with like 8 people. Maybe a fps like CS?

Oh last one question. I read something somewhere (i have read a lot about Pandora the last few days) about it being based off one the Linux distro's and as such it should be able to play games off the distro without being ported or at the least the port would literally by changing maybe a few words which anyone could do. Is that correct or completely false?

P.s On the wiki it says;

Who is making it?

The primary developers are Craig "Cragix" Rothwell, Michael "MWeston" Weston, and Michael "EvilDragon" Mrozek.

-----------------------------------------------

Surely the "Cragix" is wrong and it means "Craigix".

-----------------------------------------------

P.p.s Sorry for that essay lol. I guess i had a few questions and wanted to make up for not posting for a bit.

 

[Tom`]

The only thing i can really say is that if the psp and the; BlackBerry RIM, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian S60 and J2ME Phones can ALL do Skype then so can the Pandora.

It just may take time.

well, that presumes that Skype will port their client. The thing is, there may not be enough Pandora users to convince them that it's worthwhile.

Would the Pandora be capable of downloading files off websites or utorrent etc so that we could then play the files straight away without having to (like the psp) plug it into a pc and move to to the right place.

Yes. Well, utorrent is windows only, but there will probably be some torrent program.

Also would kind of video files would it be able to play. Would it be limited or a case of most work. Such as mp4, ALL avi's, divx ,xvid, 3gp (would that be possible?), rmvb? (that one makes me think no), mov (a no?) or mpeg etc.

Same question for audio really. Would program specific ones work such as Wma work etc? I guess they should since most if not all codecs are available now.

I'm not sure of 3gp or rmvb, but the others should be fine. If you want to know exactly what codecs will work, check the compatibility of mplayer and VLC.
WMA should work, as long as the files don't have DRM. Otherwise you will have to break the DRM encryption using your PC first.

Would be be able to play something like Warcraft 2 multi-player?

Or even anything multi-player with like 8 people. Maybe a fps like CS?

Of course, if no Linux source is available a port is probably impossible, but otherwise it depends on the requirements of the game. Some, like Cube should run perfectly with a minimum of porting (Cube already has an OpenGL ES version for ARM devices), which supports large numbers of players.
CS is out of the question, since no source code is available - unless you pay Valve or whoever an enormous amount of money to port it - I would guess this would be in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, minimum.

Oh last one question. I read something somewhere (i have read a lot about Pandora the last few days) about it being based off one the Linux distro's and as such it should be able to play games off the distro without being ported or at the least the port would literally by changing maybe a few words which anyone could do. Is that correct or completely false?

It depends on the game. This is likely true of some simple games (think PySol or some of the Ubuntu games, for example), but many or most games will need to be modified to use OpenGL ES rather than straight OpenGL, which requires some pretty advanced knowledge of graphics programming.

Also, in most cases the application will have to be changed to take advantage of the Pandora's control scheme.



And, you can change the wiki if you see an obvious error.

 

[Chip]

<Condensed for ease of answering>

1. The only thing i can really say is that if the psp and the; BlackBerry RIM, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian S60 and J2ME Phones can ALL do Skype then so can the Pandora.
2. Now i just need to know the home-brew scene will beat the gp2x's one and that it's relatively easy to port to and code for.
3. Would the Pandora be capable of downloading files off websites or utorrent etc so that we could then play the files straight away without having to (like the psp) plug it into a pc and move to to the right place.
4. Also would kind of video files would it be able to play. Would it be limited or a case of most work. Such as mp4, ALL avi's, divx ,xvid, 3gp (would that be possible?), rmvb? (that one makes me think no), mov (a no?) or mpeg etc.
5. Would be be able to play something like Warcraft 2 multi-player?
6. it should be able to play games off the distro without being ported or at the least the port would literally by changing maybe a few words which anyone could do.
7. Surely the "Cragix" is wrong and it means "Craigix".

1. Skype itself is closed source. Actual Skype clients for those devices were developed by Skype. There are open source alternatives that may make their way to Pandora.
2. Probably, but that's not something you can predict for sure.
3. Yes for websites. Yes for torrents if/when somebody ports a BT client.
4. Yes. Mplayer will handle just about every AV format/container you can find.
5. Not directly. WC2 is closed source. There is an open source RTS engine that can use WC data files which may be ported eventually.
6. Some ports will be pretty trivial. Not all though, and nothing will "just work" without some tweaking.
7. Yep, it was a typo. Fixed.