How Long Before The Pandora Becomes "nothing Special"?

[TaG]

"nothing Special" is very subjective. Their are people that believe their Dreamcast is very special still. They aren't 'wrong', it's just that is not the 'latest thing'.

If the Pandora takes off a bigger company might attempt to introduce a competitor, but it would be miraculous if it was anywhere near as "open".
I can't see who is going to create a 'competitor' as the Pandora does not meet anyone else's business plans or philosophy. The console makers want locked down software to sell loads of games. The rest of the umpc/netbook/whatever makers will not do anything for the price or be very interested in the amng controls instead of an extra row of keys on the keyboard.

 

[mechanizeddeath]

The "sheer amount of roadblocks" we've seen have little to do with anything other than they typical comedy of errors ongoing with any new product development (you just don't typically get to SEE the "fun" like you're doing here...)- I should know, I've been involved with that sort of thing for about the last 6+ years now. Couple that with a global economic slowdown, typical Internet idiocy, etc. and you've got the story here.

Heh... Yeah, it's just the way things happen. No need to ascribe to malice what can adequately be ascribed to an ordinary SNAFU situation. There's a reason why many don't go into business and why most businesses fail within the first year or so.

Well that's good to know! I was pretty certain that it was just "the way it is" but without prior experience of my own, I had no way of knowing for sure. Like everyone else, I'm really looking forward to our new toy, and the thought of someone or someones deliberately impeding progress was rather upsetting to say the least. :lol:

 

[kin]

*Kin slaps his face and let him refrase the question:

Replying to How Long The Pandora will stay as an exclusive item?


:lol:


Well... as long there is good games and software being developed it will last forever.
Computer technology will come to a point that only realistic 3D technology will continue to advance.

Sadly in my opinion, many good looking 3D games lack playability.

 

[Tor]

Don't forget (or maybe some of you didn't know) that the current ARM market is quite a bit larger than x86 - the number of ARM CPUs sold per year is almost three times the number of x86 CPUs. x86 may have run over most other architectures already, but not this one.

(If you search around you'll find the ARM yearly reports online. NB: Find the right ARM.. not every ARM out there is about CPUs.)

 

[Svartalf]

"nothing Special" is very subjective. Their are people that believe their Dreamcast is very special still. They aren't 'wrong', it's just that is not the 'latest thing'.

Raises his hand... There's a reason why I've got...<*counting consoles*>...5 current console machines tied to my 42" LCD TV right at the moment...

QUOTE
I can't see who is going to create a 'competitor' as the Pandora does not meet anyone else's business plans or philosophy. The console makers want locked down software to sell loads of games. The rest of the umpc/netbook/whatever makers will not do anything for the price or be very interested in the amng controls instead of an extra row of keys on the keyboard.


The MID players might be interested in something- but only if we succeed wildly in what we're attempting to do. (At which point discussions for the Pandora 2 should probably begin and should look towards taking that high-road position yet again... )

 

[sindbad]

x86 is not inherently very powerful, it's just popular. All those good looking games could run just fine on an A8 and most certainly on an A9. Apple switched to intel because of bootcamp mostly.

You've got that backwards... Bootcamp was done because they switched to X86.

For the record, Apple didn't move to X86 because it was intrinsically better. It's not.

IBM couldn't supply mobile G5 parts that were credible against the Intel lineup at the time.

I meant that they recognised the advantage of running windows on their machines.

 

[Svartalf]

I meant that they recognised the advantage of running windows on their machines.

As far as I'm concerned, that's more of a disadvantage...

The only compelling thing Windows has over MacOS and Linux is games are more "prevalent" on that platform.
We're working on things with the OpenPandora that might change even that story.

 

[nubie]

Well with Nvidia now making gpus for Intel's Atom. Netbooks will become a more sought after portable pc. Maybe a new company will pick up these new boards and create a Pandora-like project using this new Atom-Nvidia combination.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/sff_ion.html




Oh yeah, because netbooks aren't 5 times the size of the pandora, so it should be easy.

Just to bring it into perspective: With a battery larger than the entire pandora it can't even manage the same battery life.

I take it you didn't notice the board is about the size of Pandora's PCB. Battery size, that's a different issue all together.


Ok, I have been following the ITX scene (and nano and pico-itx for that matter), here is how it breaks down:

The Pandora PCB has Wifi/BT/Keyboard and RAM integrated.

The Ion mobo doesn't even have the RAM installed (DDR3 SO-DIMM), or the (definitely required) heatsink and fan.

I would love to see a native handheld x86, but I really don't expect one in the next couple years, and I am pretty sure it won't be competitive on power consumption.

 

[mali]

Seeing someone mentioning Nvidia again, this is my chance topost this. Nvidia Tegra is outdated and Ion is x86 crap, but yesterday when I was reading beagle board's IRC I stumbled upon an ARM-licensee link:
http://www.arm.com/products/licensing/licencees.html
Apparently Nvidia has licensed Cortex A9. Tegra II or something like that could be quite interesting if they have got a competitive low power GPU in the works in parallel. Something for Pandora 2 maybe in a few years.
Edit:
For those interested in Tegra, it only supports Win CE.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Talking with a rep from Toshiba a month or so back, he reckons that small powerful systems are going to be the next huge thing for them, and they are working on a motherboard about the size of a matchbox. There is definitely going to be a lot of competition in about a year or so.

 

[mali]

A really cool innovation would be a standardised SoC interface. You have for example a device with great controls, nice case and screen like Pandora and just swap the pluggable SoC from time to time with an upgraded version. You could equip all kinds of devices like notebooks, PCs set top boxes, handhelds etc. with such a SoC interface.

 

[nubie]

A really cool innovation would be a standardised SoC interface. You have for example a device with great controls, nice case and screen like Pandora and just swap the pluggable SoC from time to time with an upgraded version. You could equip all kinds of devices like notebooks, PCs set top boxes, handhelds etc. with such a SoC interface.

I don't know, we are a very long way from standards in laptops, let alone palm-tops.

It would be neat, but who is going to agree to it? Basically it gives control to the consumers, who will either use it to buy the lowest margin products from all companies concerned and assemble their own systems, or will complain that they can't make it work at all.

I see the BeagleBoard as the perfect starting point, perhaps when DisplayPort becomes standard (replacing the need for HDMI/DVI to LVDS circuitry in the display) we can get a BeagleBoard 2 with 1GB memory and 2GB flash and use it to make our own handhelds.