It's x86.
I'll never make the mistake of buying an x86 portable ever again.
Just curious. Why?
As x86 is the mainstream architecture, it gets many cheap, poorly made or proprietary windows-only parts. A lot of manufacturers minimize cost by stuffing substandard hardware built into an x86 machine. This is not a problem with desktops as I build them myself, but with laptops, you're stuck with what they give you for the most part. I'm sick of Realtek sound chips that sound like crap, Broadcom wifi hardware that hate linux, ATi Mobility video drivers that won't even boot on FreeBSD, excessive power consumption and heat generation and a case that doesn't hold together. I've had multiple x86 laptops and there is nothing that I've honestly liked. To be fair, I've not tried a netbook, and I hear the Eee in particular can come with either Windows or Linux, so at least the hardware is compatible. Also, there has been progress in power consumption with chipsets like Atom, but compare that to ARM and it's still far behind. Bottom line, an x86 portable is trying to make Windows portable with moderate success.
An ARM portable is designed to be portable in the first place. Now, the user doesn't control the hardware any more than they would for any other portable, but the mindset is different. These devices are designed to be carried around, and are optimized to be as convenient as possible in this task.
The Pandora in particular looks to have some good quality hardware in it - Just compare things like video resolution or RAM to similarly sized portables. It even has a Burr Brown sound chip - creating and listening to audio is one of my hobbies so this is very important. I'm hard pressed to find a single area of hardware OpenPandora has skimped on, and since it runs Linux, of course the hardware is 100% compatible with it. That, and the fact that it runs *exclusively* linux means that the community filters out quite a bit of cruft - no offense to new Linux users, but Linux people are a lot easier to deal with than Windows people on an internet forum.
