Official Blog Post: What The Bloody 'ell Happened?

[shunun]

Apple are so secretive. But that's what I like about apple. They don't generate hype, they simply release the product.. the hype follows once it's released, and why not. They're so innovative.. If OP has apples kind of money the pandora would be out long ago.

edit: IPad users can do things netbook users could only dream of.

Why are there two fking posts...

 

[mali]

Apple are so secretive. But that's what I like about apple. They don't generate hype, they simply release the product.. the hype follows once it's released, and why not. They're so innovative.. If OP has apples kind of money the pandora would be out long ago.

:blink:

 

[Prometheus]

10h surfing is what current netbooks do and they do a hell lot of other things also, that iPad users can only dream of

I'm terribly sorry to be off-topic here, but this piqued my curiousity, mali, and I really must ask because it would be useful to know.

When did netbooks with a 10 hour battery life become available? I have yet to see one that comes with this capability out-of-the-box - all of the ones I've seen can only manage about two or three hours of WiFi time at best, with the screen at about half brightness or less. (Having to buy a second battery that costs almost as much as the computer doesn't count in my book. )

 

[mali]

Off the top of my head there were ASUS and Acer Menlow based netbooks a while ago that managed 10-12h battery life. Also you have to have in mind that those 10h web surfing Apple claims haven't been confirmed by a user, yet One of the beta testers claimed 2-3h of web surfing, but he might have had a different battery or less optimized system, who knows.

(Off Topic)²
My 11.6" CULV laptop surfs 7h with a full blown Firefox in Vista and a dozen tabs open including Youtube.

 

[shunun]

Off the top of my head there were ASUS and Acer Menlow based netbooks a while ago that managed 10-12h battery life. Also you have to have in mind that those 10h web surfing Apple claims haven't been confirmed by a user, yet One of the beta testers claimed 2-3h of web surfing, but he might have had a different battery or less optimized system, who knows.

Nor has anyone proven the Pandora's battery life. Anyway the battery life will always depend on what you're doing. For example, wifi, usb, blutooth, drive interaction will use more power. A bit like phones that won't allow calls when the battery is low. And of course if you're not doing anything (which is probably how they tested the netbook, IPad, Pandora etc) then your battery is going to last alot longer. You probably knew that already, but others may not.

 

[mali]

Nor has anyone proven the Pandora's battery life.

It's easy to guess, because there are similar systems out there. An Archos 5 IT(800MHz A8, OMAP3) surfs 6h and has a battery capacity of around 1500mAh. Pandora's battery is gigantic compared to them. Provided we get a proper power management, we'll beat any system out there

 

[Prometheus]

I'm a few posts late, but: Thankyou muchly, mali.

 

[shunun]

Well that's nice to know mali. I'd favor a pandora in my pocket any day over a Netbook or an IPad.




Oh wait... THEY DON'T FIT IN A POCKET. Burn.. andora2ut4:

I have the feeling someone is about to start a new topic regarding the IPad soon. It'll probably be called "PANDORA VS. IPAD" or something stupid lol.
I'll still get an ipad, you know how us gadget junkies are

 

[Sugar_Kane]

Personally I find the Ipad about as desirable as a video of the night I was conceived.

I have an Iphone, which I do enjoy but it is so locked down. I can't believe that you can't bluetooth files to another phone, or even store any of your files on it. And let's face it, all of the games (with the exception of the ones that SCUMM has had covered for about 10 years) are utter shit, and most of the apps are about as useful as a glass baseball bat. The media player is painfully clumsy. Don't even get me started on itunes!

This thing is really just a flashy toy for the rich, I can't see it being of any concern to anyone that wants a device that will do more than surf the web and drain a battery in under an hour.

RE Pandora battery life: Didn't Craig mention that their battery figures were going to be a true representation of battery life under normal use, rather than optimal conditions? As he was tired of other company's deliberately misleading figures.

 

[bzar]

Personally I find the Ipad about as desirable as a video of the night I was conceived.

I have an Iphone, which I do enjoy but it is so locked down. I can't believe that you can't bluetooth files to another phone, or even store any of your files on it. And let's face it, all of the games (with the exception of the ones that SCUMM has had covered for about 10 years) are utter shit, and most of the apps are about as useful as a glass baseball bat. The media player is painfully clumsy. Don't even get me started on itunes!

This thing is really just a flashy toy for the rich, I can't see it being of any concern to anyone that wants a device that will do more than surf the web and drain a battery in under an hour.

+1, now if you could put the new KDE 4.4 (qt kinetic multitouch support) on an iPad...

EDIT: Of course I mean some nice linux distro with the new KDE. Just to clarify.

 

[Argtrak]

Personally I find the Ipad about as desirable as a video of the night I was conceived.

I have an Iphone, which I do enjoy but it is so locked down. I can't believe that you can't bluetooth files to another phone, or even store any of your files on it. And let's face it, all of the games (with the exception of the ones that SCUMM has had covered for about 10 years) are utter shit, and most of the apps are about as useful as a glass baseball bat. The media player is painfully clumsy. Don't even get me started on itunes!

This thing is really just a flashy toy for the rich, I can't see it being of any concern to anyone that wants a device that will do more than surf the web and drain a battery in under an hour.

I must agree. Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a real USB host port on there either. (something about a docking to usb cable (dunno if it's actually a host port) but WHY not a real usb port?) It's like you HAVE to be an "Apple person" aka "posessing the whole set of apple devices" to use it and feel like you're not limited in some way or another.

(And then you still need itunes :blink: )

 

[shunun]

Well iphones are about as common as cold ice these days and the latest ones cost more than the IPad new. So is everyone rich? I don't own an iphone myself, but i have the money, i just choose not to because everyone at work has one, and they're not that great i suppose. But the IPad looks way more useful to me. I know alot of you probably don't think so. But i have found there are two kinds of people on the internet. Macs, and PC's. The pandora is probably somewhere in the middle.. The innovation of Apple (well not quite) and the practical of Microsoft.

 

[bzar]

Well iphones are about as common as cold ice these days and the latest ones cost more than the IPad new. So is everyone rich? I don't own an iphone myself, but i have the money, i just choose not to because everyone at work has one, and they're not that great i suppose. But the IPad looks way more useful to me. I know alot of you probably don't think so. But i have found there are two kinds of people on the internet. Macs, and PC's. The pandora is probably somewhere in the middle.. The innovation of Apple (well not quite) and the practical of Microsoft.

If we define a scale so that a "mac" person is -10 and a "pc person is +10, I'd put the "pandora" person around 1+8i.

 

[Poem58]

I agree, if someone wants a nice large web browsing experience with the battery life of a Pandora, the iPad might be a good alternative. I will never own one nor would I get an iPhone. I'd much rather have a Pandora with gaming controls and such. The fact that the stupid Pad doesn't even have an SD slot to watch movies or whatever is going to be a definite negative. Of course knowing Apple, they will put on in the next iteration and act like it's a revolutionary idea they invented. They don't want an SD reader now, as they want you to buy your video's off itunes, not supply your own, then the next one will have on specifically for the purpose of storing more of your itunes content. REVOLUTIONARY!!!!
Blech.

I fear for nothing more then what the A9's coming out might mean to the overall picture of the Pandora. They now will still have the best concept of the handheld gaming device but no longer cutting edge on portable device processing. Might make it a slightly harder sell in the long run, especially if another company designs something that many would consider to be good enough even without the awesome controls. Let's face it people love gadgets and more power (Tim Allen Grunt). If they can get the cases and get these out within the next month or so and get a couple more batches out this year, I think they will be fine. If this drags on much longer, well, only time will tell.

 

[Sugar_Kane]

Well iphones are about as common as cold ice these days and the latest ones cost more than the IPad new. So is everyone rich? I don't own an iphone myself, but i have the money, i just choose not to because everyone at work has one, and they're not that great i suppose. But the IPad looks way more useful to me. I know alot of you probably don't think so. But i have found there are two kinds of people on the internet. Macs, and PC's. The pandora is probably somewhere in the middle.. The innovation of Apple (well not quite) and the practical of Microsoft.

I was lured in by the glittering promises of Apple. I was 50/50 between an HTC hero and the Iphone, then I thought to myself 'well, they're all trying to be the Iphone, so.. ' It was once I had signed the contract that I started to realise the dreadful limitations of the device. It IS a good casual web browser, but serious or sustained browsing is quite painful with a capacitive touch screen.

 

[Monk]

Monk, you are mixing some things.

No...not entirely I'm not.

More than one is multi, so a dual core _is_ a multi core.

Yes, it is. But how many cores is multi core? Or to put it another way, dual core is multi core but multi core isn't dual core (or triple core or quad core or...).

I feel like I'm ordering a case mold from a Chinese factory here, but it's a nuance. If you say "dual core" you're saying "2 cores". If you say "Multi Core" you're saying "2 OR MORE cores" - which is obviously less clear. Why say "multi" when "dual" is more accurate/specific AND less typing? It's like the difference between "soon" and "as soon as we've done it". IMHO. So I was trying to point out that taking more effort to say "2 or more cores" seemed a bit of a stretch when 2 cores seemed to be unlikely.

Those Windows specs you listed are for the host you want to connect the iPad to. 10h surfing is what current netbooks do and they do a hell lot of other things also, that iPad users can only dream of

Doh! Guilty as charged, didn't see the "PC with USB 2.0 port" line on the specs

Also, I have a netbook - bought LONG after I gave up hope of OpenPandora making good on the delivery of my Pandora and I gave in and spent money elsewhere AS WELL. I could only dream of getting 10 hours of WiFi browsing out of it - I'd be lucky to see 4, IMHO.

 

[mali]

Hehe, dual=multi, quad=multi, single=/=multi. A9 can scale up to 4 cores and Engadget claims that iPad's A9 is the same as Tegra2 so it's dual. Engadget talks a lot of nonsense on a long day, so who knows.

Edit:
As a side note regarding Engadget, recently they claimed a random Chinese device to have a Cortex A9 when in fact it had an ARM9 :lol:

 

[Phawx]

Yea, I saw that engadget article as well, and I think they are mistaken. Maybe they are attributing what PA Semi was working on akin to an A9. I mean it was only a month ago that ARM was showing off A9's clocked at 500 Mhz. I didn't think they were ready to start rolling out new chips yet.

 

[Exophase]

Yea, I saw that engadget article as well, and I think they are mistaken. Maybe they are attributing what PA Semi was working on akin to an A9. I mean it was only a month ago that ARM was showing off A9's clocked at 500 Mhz. I didn't think they were ready to start rolling out new chips yet.

Cortex-A9 was announced over 2 years ago. I don't know when it first became available for licensing but it was probably similarly long ago. Tegra-2 has Cortex-A9, and chips must have been sampling for months; we know that devices with it are going to be released pretty soon.

ARM, as an IP vendor, does not make actual CPU hardware in any official capacity. They could have never publicly demonstrated working silicon and it wouldn't have been especially strange (of course these companies need to do reference implementations but they don't have to show them to anyone). 500MHz was a very conservative clock speed and is not representative of what Cortex-A9 is capable of.

The PowerPC chip PA Semi was known to have been working on bears no resemblance to an ARM anything.

In short: if nVidia pulled it off there's no real reason why Apple couldn't have. Especially since their chip probably contains more third party cores than Tegra 2 does (that's just an educated guess at this point though). In fact, given that they acquired PA Semi after the Cortex-A9 announce I don't see a compelling reason for them to have choosen A8 over A9 at all. A8 would have been a more mature design, but Apple could have probably rolled in A9 fixes during development without disrupting everything else too much.

 

[Phawx]

As always, thanks for the info Exophase. Now, I am saddened. Ignorance is bliss, you know?

Oh well, I would rather have quad-core A9 running at 2Ghz for Pandora2 or my next cellphone. Though dual core A9 running at 1ghz is quite zippy on the iPad.

If the iPad comes out before the Pandora... /sigh

damn.

Edit: PA Semi did fab the A4 though, right? I'm confused somewhere because at the conference Steve Jobs said they are making their own silicon. Or did they just have another company fab it for them?