My Pandora Thoughts After A Couple Days


paytonmg75

Still Fresh
Joined
Feb 7, 2010
Messages
6
Hellollo everyone! I received my Pandora on Friday, and have been playing around with it near constantly since. I´d like to share my experience, and hopefully add a little to the mix.

First, the physical aspects. To me the size and heft of the unit is very nice. I have no problems using the controls and keyboard. I could see it might be an issue if you have large hands. The D-pad is very nice and the AXBY buttons work well. The shoulder buttons take a little getting used to, and on my unit both left and right have pretty much the same feel. The keyboard keys have to be pressed in with a bit more force than I expected, but I quickly got used to that. I keep trying to press the non-existent Right Shift key, but I'm getting better. The only pain is when you need to hit Shift and a key on the left side of the keyboard. Only if you were writing something really long would I see a need for the use of an external keyboard. At first I thought that something was wrong with the stylus holder as it was very difficult to remove. But after some use it as loosen up to were it is snug. The power switch, SD card slots, and volume knob are nicely recessed. At first I was almost annoyed with that, as I felt it was too far in, but after taking it around with me, I see the value as you are not going to accidentally turn it on, pop out a SD card, or change the volume. The one thing I did notice immediately is when closed there is a slightly larger gap on the left side. Others have mentioned it also. Its not a big deal to me, because it doesn't seem to affect anything as far as I can tell. Overall I am very pleased the the build quality. If are looking up close, you can see some variances in the fit. But you have to be purposefully looking. I'm sure the average person, if handed this to try out, would never notice it. The LCD screen is very crisp, I haven't come across any ghosting, and touchscreen functions well.

Second, the software side. On the part, I am struggling somewhat; I am a linux noob. Its taking a bit, but I am starting to get up to speed, well enough to get emulators working and install the hotfixes and codec pack and some additional browsers. On that note, Midori crashes on me a lot. But I'm using FF3, so not an issue for me. I do have the crackly sound issue, but I found Notaz's temp fix, and sound is good now. Overall things have a beta feel to them. Not a knock against it, it is what I expected, and everything works for me. Wifi does act up after sometime, but toggling it off and on clears it up. When I initially connected to my router, I couldn't get any sites to load. But I power cycled my router and its been fine ever since. Sometimes there is a glitch with the SD card, but rebooting seems to solve it.

Overall, I absolutely love the system! It really is something else to have in a unit slightly larger than my DS lite all these old console, dos, arcade games, and a desktop environment, with sweet gaming controls. I`ve heard the 'just get a netbook' argument before, but it just doesn't add up to the experience the pandora gives. By far, biggest thing on my wishlist would be pandora standardization (pandization?) of the emulator controls, i.e. same button for menu access, etc. I know things are still in the early stages, but what better time to do this?

The pandora is still a bit rough, but the foundation for everything is down. I can see what the possibilities are for this unit, and its very exciting! The combination of keyboard, game controls, an open OS environment add up to an exerience more than the sum of its parts. Sorry if I come across as fanboyish, but I have used so many devices and thought 'this is nice, but I really wish I could do {insert function} with it, then it would be great!'.

Some parting thoughts to wrap up with. This post written on my pandy. And if I have covered any problems that have already been addressed, my apologies. I've been enthralled with playing games and leaning how to set things up. Hope I added something of interest to anyone. Please post questions if you have them, and I'll do my best to answer.

Thanks to the OP team and everyone involved with the project. It's been worth the wait.

MG Payton
 
Sounds good.Im still getting used to mine.Am a linux noob too.I am absolutely chuffed with mine.
 
Slingshot said:
The only pain is when you need to hit Shift and a key on the left side of the keyboard.

The Left Shoulder Button is mapped to Shift. This allows you to hit things on the left side of the keyboard with ease.

Slingshot said:
Sometimes there is a glitch with the SD card, but rebooting seems to solve it.

What kind of glitch? Most glitches like PNDs not showing up or the SD not showing up can simply be fixed by ejecting and replacing the SD. I would try that first so you can hopefully save yourself from having to reboot.

Slingshot said:
By far, biggest thing on my wishlist would be pandora standardization (pandization?) of the emulator controls, i.e. same button for menu access, etc. I know things are still in the early stages, but what better time to do this?

You may, then, be interested in this topic: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54372-pandora-key-as-universal-menu-key/

-God Ginrai
 
Last edited by a moderator:
God Ginrai said:
Slingshot said:
Sometimes there is a glitch with the SD card, but rebooting seems to solve it.

What kind of glitch? Most glitches like PNDs not showing up or the SD not showing up can simply be fixed by ejecting and replacing the SD. I would try that first so you can hopefully save yourself from having to reboot.
My experience has been that eject/replace is not 100% successful, fairly often, the card fails to re-mount. I had thought this was a known issue to do with unmount, but maybe not.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Nice review!
Yeah i found even with a gadget freak like me that it takes a week to get your head around everything and its overwhelming when you first receive your unit, though its getting better and easier after each hotfix, but maybe a PDF file could be created for users to have even less understanding of getting it all up and running, i know the unit comes with a quick start guide but thats as useful as a chocolate fireguard!
Just something simple in the order they need to be done when you first receive it i.e place battery, charge, install your first game/emulator/play music/view pics/view movies/get connected to the internet.

Yeah i know its all probably somewhere on this forum, but again having it in 1 PDF file over 2-3 pages that maybe they can print out will make it easier and painless than some have found it...
 
TO Linux noobs who don;t know this: make sure you unmount things before removing them! Otherwise you might need a reboot before you can remount the device, I've even had files recently saved onto the device disappear by removing without unmounting (I was in a hurry, on a derro laptop that "needs to page just to login" (quote Bastard Operator From Hell)).
This is probably the wrong place but God Ginrai's post reminded me of it.

I'd also recommend to the OP team to include this message on startup, it's well known among Linux users but I don't believe others really know this.
 
doublebeta said:
TO Linux noobs who don;t know this: make sure you unmount things before removing them! Otherwise you might need a reboot before you can remount the device, I've even had files recently saved onto the device disappear by removing without unmounting (I was in a hurry, on a derro laptop that "needs to page just to login" (quote Bastard Operator From Hell)).
This is probably the wrong place but God Ginrai's post reminded me of it.

I'd also recommend to the OP team to include this message on startup, it's well known among Linux users but I don't believe others really know this.

The Pandora's unmounting is broken at the moment. Also, the system mounts sd cards with sync currently (and I think dirsync in Hotfix 3?) so that you can eject the cards without needing to unmount just like with any game device.

-God Ginrai
 
Last edited by a moderator:
doublebeta said:
TO Linux noobs who don;t know this: make sure you unmount things before removing them! Otherwise you might need a reboot before you can remount the device, I've even had files recently saved onto the device disappear by removing without unmounting
Happened to me using Windows, so this is not just for Linux noobs. When working with removable media => ALWAYS unmount/safely remove/whatever it's called on your OS!

Although imho unmounting shouldn't be needed on Pandora. My eyes don't perceive it as a regular system, so jsut pulling out the cards must work.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thanks for the feedback everybody. I was initially a little hesitant to post, being a long time forum lurker :p Love the L1 button to shift! Thanks God Ginrai. I try to keep up with the postings, but its hard to catch it all.

Its just minor issues with SD card, like sometimes the file manager can see a file, but a program can't access it. But its only happened maybe a half dozen times. And I have been heavily using it, so its very infrequent.

I think its progressing towards a more structured environment, jaycee900. But I do think its important for people to understand that its in a beta state. If they have a different expectation for right now, they'll be disappointed.
 
Slingshot said:
Thanks for the feedback everybody. I was initially a little hesitant to post, being a long time forum lurker :p Love the L1 button to shift! Thanks God Ginrai. I try to keep up with the postings, but its hard to catch it all.

Its just minor issues with SD card, like sometimes the file manager can see a file, but a program can't access it. But its only happened maybe a half dozen times. And I have been heavily using it, so its very infrequent.

Yep, that's when unmount / remount wasn't working well.
It gives the name /media/mmcblk0p1 to the first SD Card. If you remove it and it didn't unmount properly, it uses the next free name, e.g. /media/mmcblk1p1
That way, a filemanager might've still the old directory structure in its cache, but no program could find it.

Hotfix 3 uses Label names, so this should not happen.
Also, unless you have a file from the SD Card opened somewhere when you remove it, unmount should also work properly :)
 
Last edited:
Alerino said:
i still have a few problems with label-maintaning
After ejecting the '8gb' sd card, i've had a 2 gb one being labeled '8gb-1' just after that, i think the system is confusing folder names inside /media

Hmmm? Are you sure the 2GB card didn't accidentally have a label named 8gb?

It only adds a -1 if the label of the SD Card name is like that and there's already a mounted one :eek:
 
Last edited:
I also removed a labelled card to replace with an un-labelled one to find the un-labelled one appeared as /media/NIKON (which was the label of the one I had just removed). With labels on both cards, I have not seen any confusion yet.
 
tsh said:
I also removed a labelled card to replace with an un-labelled one to find the un-labelled one appeared as /media/NIKON (which was the label of the one I had just removed). With labels on both cards, I have not seen any confusion yet.

Aaah! Then there seems to be some bug with using un-labelled ones after labelled ones!
Will dive into this :D
 
Last edited:
Back
Top