A lot of money is : E
nough money to cover all expenses, pay a reasonable wage for time spent, pay off investors, invest in future product development, provide significant rewards for voluntary software / firmware work, and perhaps have a little bit left over to buy a few obscure Japanese RPGs from eBay.
Target user base is : 10,000 units sold
Target sale price : $650 delivered (current retail price of 1Ghz Pandora is approx $750 delivered)
It's appreciated that a few of these ideas really ruffled the feathers of some of the armchair iconoclasts who inhabit these boards (those who get pleasure from hating tablets / android / things that appeal to noobs and also loving the things spurned by the majority, such a linux only mini laptop) I should know, I'm a bit of an armchair iconoclast myself.
With that in mind try and shelve your personal antipathy towards Android and answer the following question :
If P2 ran Linux out of the box what would you lose if it also ran a fully functional version of Android?
Here is what it would gain : Sales.
There are 10's of millions of people who really like Android I bet OP GmbH could find a few thousand of them who would be willing to spend $650 on the unique proposition of a mini Android Laptop with built in Hardware controls if the Spec was competitive when compared to existing hardware.
There are also plenty of people like me who would also see the inclusion of Android as really adding value to the proposition of buying a P2 due to existing familiarity of the Android OS and investment in the Android software ecosystem.
My hatred towards Android is kinda from my past experience with it. My samsung galaxy note 10.1 semi-bricked about 5 times, and from that point I never ever even tried to learn how to use android. May be it's my fault of rooting it, or installing some well-recieved custom firmwares. But still, it was frustrating. I do agree with you now comes to think about it. Pandora would be more awesome if it comes with native android support, however, ED would need to pay microsoft a few bucks for each console he sold, and I hate microsoft even more than google. So nah, take my attitude on android with a grain of salt.
I guess it doesn't cost that much to include android in pandora. So, it feels like a viable option to extend our target market. Thanks for your post, I come to my senses after re-evaluating android. I still hates it though.
I'm kinda amazed by the fact that nobody is suggesting making pandora a indie game market place. Like what GCW is trying to achieve. It would be cool, but I have this sneaking suspicion that indie developers would make more money to just publish their games on PSN, appstore, googleplay than on some obscure UMPC of whose user base is only in the thousands.
Another topic I would like to adress is, back in the old days, a console or computer has to have some sort of killer apps. But today it seems functionality and the size of the software library is more important than having exclusive exotic apps. It would be helpful if P2 can run sage with less problems though. May be we can contact the sage team to help us giving sage supports for fat32 format sd cards.
As for providing 3d printer blue prints for pandora's case, it sounds kinda cool, but isn't things coming out of a 3d printer tends to be very brittle and have rough finishes? I've also heard about how 3d printer is bad for one's health.
Wouldn't it be sweet if we can do 3d modeling on p2? This is something android will never support, because android and ios tablets are more like toys than workstations.