Hi there!
This is Thorgan's first post, hope you'll enjoy it.
I got my pandora on thurday. Ordered 30 of september, 2008 16:22 (paris time).
An now, a quick review:
About the hardware:
My pandora came without stylus (I don't care, I have a spare NDS lite one that fits perfectly in the case).
Case is made of a nice hard plastic, seems really robust (already traveled in my backpack with keys and other stuff, didn't get a scratch). The whole unit is a little bit heavy compared to ds lite.
Keyboard was pretty hard to press at first, now it's getting softer and thumb-typing is really quick and painless. The keyboard layout is natural and efficient for me. Beware of long nails: my enter key got a little scratched on the top left edge.
Nubs have a weak travel resistance compared to the psp nub (especially the right one), they feel precise and comfortable. I didn't expect the mouse control to be that efficient!
Shoulder buttons as well as the ABXY buttons were making a squeaky sound at first but once they wear a little bit it disappear.
Volume control is a little bit too much buried in the case to my taste, but it allows a really precise control.
Screen is really bright and colorful, however I already noticed a little bit of ghosting in the nes emulator, less than the first psp screen but still noticeable.
The wifi is stable when you are in the access point room (2 hours of shoutcast streaming with no problem). I tried in a room where the signal gets weaker, I've experienced frequent disconnections with erratic automatic recovering (psp and nintendo ds don't disconnect at all), I guess it's mainly a software problem.
Overclocking goes to 850mhz with no problem.
Battery lasted more than 8 hours with wifi and me messing around
.
About the default software :
- cold boot is fast, with no graphical glitches, very clean. Wifi autoconnection is fast.
- xfce works well but feels like not 2d accelerated (if you tried yellowdog linux on ps3 you know what I mean), I noticed some audio skipping in gnome mplayer when opening a new program or moving a window around.
- pidgin crashes often when typing text. I advice changing the default setting of pidgin to disable logging, it helps a little bit (and preserve your nand).
- the default web browser crashes a lot when using the "back" button. Downloading a file (pnd for example) to sd card freezes the browser until it completes! Chromium would be a better choice (faster and perfectly stable) if it had HTTPS.
- wifi reconnection is broken, I have to toggle wifi off/on to get the connection back.
- auto mounting of sd cards seems reliable, however, pnds are sometimes not shown when reinserting the sd card, a reboot fixes it.
- copying from a (fast) usb thumbdrive to (fast) sd card is really slow: more than 1 hour for 600MB (I'm almost sure it's a kernel/mounting problem)
- suspend mode has a little bug: if you suspend the device, close the screen, open it again, the screen will turn on but you'll have to press again the suspend slider to get the cpu speed/wifi back.
- general SD performance can be improved
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX?)
- switching from XFCE to minimenu saves xfce session (programs launched), which mean at next reboot or when you get back to xfce, every active program you had in xfce will start again, and again until you wipe the session.
About homebrews and emulators:
- n64 is amazing, period (don't forget to choose the rom using touchscreen)
- pandorapanic is really nice and polished.
- quake3 looks promising
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX?)
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX?)
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX?
)
- pnd concept is really convenient
Conclusion:
This is the most amazing piece of hardware of my personal collection
. I give it a perfect 10/10!
Now I only have to set up a nice dev environment...
Amazing job Openpandora team!
Cheers!
