Next pandora (competition model)

[Jourdy288]

Maybe a 4D screen?

 

[craigix]

No 3D nonsense if I've anything to do with it.


The changes are more radical and clever, also *nothing* has been done but talk. This isn't going to happen any time soon, if ever.

 

[gotwake424]

No 3D nonsense if I've anything to do with it.


The changes are more radical and clever, also *nothing* has been done but talk. This isn't going to happen any time soon, if ever.

THIS^

 

[FaeMinx]

Craigix you're baiting us! I'm sure it has something to do with the screen... i.e. it clips off and can be reversed thus enabling the tablet form people are asking for.


What else?


I'm interested in persuing the LED/Mono LCD ABXY mod as that more than anything SO FAR would be a radical change for the better concerning an authentic gaming experience. ... I'm constantly having to figure out what button to press, and it really does take you out of the moment and disrupt you unless you have the buttons memorized for every application.


Plus, imagine what Devs will be able to do with that.... buttons that can become anything.

 

[ensoniq2k]

Personally - I would REALLY like to see a Pandora with a 5" PixelQi dual-mode screen with equivalent to 1024x600 resolution - yeah, I'm aware that these don't exist - yet.

I had an Adam Tablet with PixelQi screen and the viewing angles are really bad, the picture was not that good and the contrast with backlight off was horrible.


I would love to see a Mirasol Disply in feature releases. It is fast and you can frontlight it, if you need to. They are planing to release the Kyobo E-Book Reader with those screens. 1024x768px on a 5.8 inch Screen is a good start. It also can display colors in bright sunlight.


Look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tT_B9qbVQDk?feature=oembed

 

[DaMummy]

its obvious that craig will put bendable screens on the next pandora

 

[Binky]

radical changes as well as laptopishness will remain.


So there will be physically small changes (like displays in buttons)


The objectives will be similar, because of the ongoing target community


At the moment, being radically different to what is on the market means not touchscreen-centric


There are a few obvious upgrades that would go towards a Pandora1.5


But a real P2 will have some big rethinks.


What could be new and exciting within the clamshell design?


New sorts of inputs? outputs? combinations?


What would happen if you put the gaming controls next to the screen? (I'm not sure if I actually think thats a good idea!)


...or re thought the hinge?


Maybe a different shape body?


---


Displays in buttons is a really nice idea, and I can image devs putting it to awesome use (does anyone know how much a tiny dot matrix display would cost?) . Are there any other new ideas out there?


---


Does Craig actually have a cunning plan, or does he simply believe that there will be one in the future?

 

[craigix]

As with the original Pandora design being a bit 'out there' the designs on the table for a P2 are equally difficult for anyone to realistically guess.


One thing is for sure though, we would never offer it for sale until it was finished and ready to ship, as with the iCP.

 

[WizardStan]

And with a couple of products under your belt already, you should have less difficulty obtaining the funding for it.

 

[fusion_power]

The Design of the Pandora never was the Problem - the Quality of the Case production was. To much tinkering on this and to less control over the Chinese Case Factory. But all this can now easily be avoided. ^^

 

[Mr_Loon]

As with the original Pandora design being a bit 'out there' the designs on the table for a P2 are equally difficult for anyone to realistically guess.


One thing is for sure though, we would never offer it for sale until it was finished and ready to ship, as with the iCP.

But will you be open to community input in the design process? If so then it might be a good idea to spill the beans re the proposed designs with plenty of time to alter things before mass production was due to start.


An indication of a realistic figure for the desired levels of sales for Pandora 2 would also help a lot with community suggestions.


It would also be nice to know who would be making Pandora 2, would it be Open Pandora Ltd, Open Pandora GmbH or a joint venture?


From a personal viewpoint I'm curious to hear what you (& ED & MWeston & Dave C) think about the LED/LCD display in a button idea? Can you see the benefits it could bring? Do you think it could be done for say less than $5 per unit? If it could be done at a reasonable price then I think it would make a rather nice USP for Pandora2.

 

[Mr Rob]

As with the original Pandora design being a bit 'out there' the designs on the table for a P2 are equally difficult for anyone to realistically guess.


One thing is for sure though, we would never offer it for sale until it was finished and ready to ship, as with the iCP.

But will you be open to community input in the design process? If so then it might be a good idea to spill the beans re the proposed designs with plenty of time to alter things before mass production was due to start.

One thing to remember is the big giant IF for the Pandora 2, so let's not get too far ahead of ourselves when we start looking at the Pandora 2, as most of the questions you had were pretty detailed and specific for this stage of the game.


It's certainly fun to discuss and think about, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

 

[Binky]

Maybe aswell as a led display in the game buttons, perhaps put an led behind each arrow on the dpad, and have glowing nubs. Then the gaming controls would have a coherent retroey feel. The LED brightness would have to be variable. What about putting miniature e-ink displays in there (as the image isn't going to change frequently)


--


If there are some possible designs floating around, Then it would make very little sense to hide them, as you need to know whether the target niche will buy the product before money goes into creating it. If not, there needs to be time to design what the niche Does want, by asking it/them?


--


If anyone knows how, I think it might be worth finding out how much patents etc on a double hinge would cost, especially as many mobile games are becoming thumbs-on-touchscreen centric, a 'tablet' mode could be useful. Also for tablety software (plasma active etc), drawing, putting a camera on the center piece, allowing it to point towards or away from the user, or using the gaming controls with your fingers while using the touchscreen with thumbs. I can a whole heap of possibility there, but if its going to put £75 on the cost of each unit, maybe not! :unsure:

 

[milkshake]

on the other side of that if they provide current designs that could also help any competitors steel designs and or ideas so he has to be carefull here.

 

[Binky]

I see the point there but,


Are Pandora designs profitable enough to be worth copying?


Surely a big chunk of the Pandora's market wouldn't buy a copy because:

• There is a enthusiastic and helpful community here
  
• A chineese knockoff would be under-powered, make huge gaffs like missing off nubs, the big battery, and the hackable linux.
  

 

[anexanhume]

Qualcomm and Samsung both make great SoCs, but neither use ImgTec (Samsung migrated to ARM's Mali GPUs with the Exynos 42xx and Qualcomm has been in the Adreno camp since the original snapdragon). Staying with TI would ensure ImgTec GPU on board. ST also uses ImgTec GPUs, and their upcoming novathor a9600 will be a beast, but like ED said, quantity will be a bear for whatever they want to get. However, IMO it's not worth pursuing an A9 if they could also potentially get an A15 unless the cost is astronomically higher.

IMG makes good GPUs but they're not the only clear choice. It really comes down more to what configurations the SoC vendors are licensing. Exynos's Mali-400MP4 easily beats the SGX540 in OMAP4430. Adreno 220 probably does too, although some of that may be contingent on drivers. The Vivante GC2000 in i.MX6 looks like the next best thing currently out after SGX543MP2 in Apple's A5. OMAP5 and Novathor will have great GPUs but those are a long way out.


But if you ask me I think it'd be foolish for OPT to heavily weight their decision based on who has the best GPU when Pandora has hardly gotten much high end 3D attention and I doubt it'll change for the next one. Unless it runs Android out of the box.


A9 SoCs they can get today, A15 in 6-9 months.. maybe.

Ah, so I'll take from this post that the GPU drivers are solely TI provided and the project to write a to-the-metal driver for the SGX535 fell through.

 

[Pickle]

Ah, so I'll take from this post that the GPU drivers are solely TI provided and the project to write a to-the-metal driver for the SGX535 fell through.

Basically yes, the driver is a blob from TI. Really any kind of 'driver' written by someone for fun is not going to produce much or be of use. Just looking at how the open source drivers for ati and nvidia have progressed, and those have been maintained by knowledgeable people over many years. (Plus on the ati side they at least were given tech docs)


Also be aware there are 2 parts to soc gpu drivers, a kernel interface and a binary blob. Some of the oems are open sourcing the interface (i.e samsung), but there is still the low level blob they havnt released and probably never will.

 

[bismuthdrummer]

As with the original Pandora design being a bit 'out there' the designs on the table for a P2 are equally difficult for anyone to realistically guess.

Maybe I am a conservative but it seems to me that, if no one can realistically guess what the design of the OP2 will be based on the successes and tragedies of the OP1, we're no longer talking about the Open Pandora 2 but a different handheld entirely. :huh:

 

[doublebeta]

I think fast nonvolatile storage is a must for productivity performance. Using the -beagleboard- with a slow microSD card is excruciating. I don't have a Pandora yet, so I don't know how well it performs in disk IO, but I can't imagine it's amazing.


I'm thinking, a low-priority low-speed (comparatively) RAM that is memory-mapped (actually connected to the same bus as the system RAM), that is solely used to cache things would be sweet. PNDs are 'installed' to this on the fly.


Of course that would require a lot of software modification, and I'm uncertain if, with modern processors, it is possible to have RAMs with differing timings. The reason for differing timings is purely something of cost, and battery, but it could just be fast, too . Linux isn't really designed for such esoteric designs... leading to my next wish:


FREE AND OPEN SOURCE DRIVERS! And GOOD DOCUMENTATION. So that hobbyists can write their own firmware and truly make the device 'open'.


Lots of general purpose coprocessors, that have fast connections to the SD and Flash modules (unlikely, this is TI's (or other multi billion $ corp with access to a chip fab) decision).


A superminimal coprocessor designed for custom video operations like the Amiga 'Copper'. (yeah, this won't be that useful. Don't you dare spoil my hopeful ignorance )


Hey, we're all dreaming here, I might as well .

 

[craigix]

As with the original Pandora design being a bit 'out there' the designs on the table for a P2 are equally difficult for anyone to realistically guess.


One thing is for sure though, we would never offer it for sale until it was finished and ready to ship, as with the iCP.

But will you be open to community input in the design process? If so then it might be a good idea to spill the beans re the proposed designs with plenty of time to alter things before mass production was due to start.


An indication of a realistic figure for the desired levels of sales for Pandora 2 would also help a lot with community suggestions.


It would also be nice to know who would be making Pandora 2, would it be Open Pandora Ltd, Open Pandora GmbH or a joint venture?


From a personal viewpoint I'm curious to hear what you (& ED & MWeston & Dave C) think about the LED/LCD display in a button idea? Can you see the benefits it could bring? Do you think it could be done for say less than $5 per unit? If it could be done at a reasonable price then I think it would make a rather nice USP for Pandora2.

I think we know what people want now, and any Pandora2 functions won't change anything, so all the inputs will be there (well, maybe not the microphone).


My initial opinion on making an LED set of buttons is that it would be expensive and an Achilles heel, imagine units being returned because one LED stopped working, this is something we're trying to avoid with the Pandora2 talks - each return costs us about £38.


I'm sure some magnetic button caps would do the job if you really wanted to change what it shows on the keys, does anyone look at the gaming buttons as they use them I wonder?


The Pandora2 might be a ZX81 to the Pandora ZX80, I don't know. I do know that the design will be far more clever, in a way more complex but in another way far far more simple. Less is more.


Before any P2 work starts though me and MWeston are working on another product which needs to be completed. We do read your suggestions and enjoy gathering a general overview of what you want.