(from the view of someone who first heard about the Pandora ~5 years ago, lost sight of it for years, got reminded just a few months back and jumped on board)
It's really been a long time.. I just skipped through all the newsletters I received from ED since I ordered the GP2X ~6 years ago..
- July 7th, 2010: "Pandora - Batch 2 Preorder via Mail -- The Pandora is alive!"
- September 7th, 2011: "5. Pandora: Wanted but hard-to-get. This will hopefully change in the future."
- January 23rd, 2013: "Pandora - still going on. It would've been great if the production company in Texas that was supposed to produce the PCBs didn't have that many issues. Over 1000 boards they produced are not working, which caused a HUGE loss."
- August 19th, 2013: "Pandora 1GHz -- Wir warten momentan noch auf eine Neulieferung - die hoffentlich in den nächsten zwei Wochen endlich eintrudelt." (waiting for new shipment which is expected to arrive within the next two weeks)
Called ED after the last newsletter and ordered this miraculous Pandora shortly after
Why? Well, for one thing it's because I think that this whole upgrading-your-HW-like-changing-socks craze nowadays is kind of stupid and the potential of the Pandora HW is far from having been fully exploited, IMHO.
I grew up in an era when it was far from unusal that SW devs needed 5-10 years to fully grasp a new HW/platform. In some cases that even took up to 20+ years.
Sure, you can bring almost every platform to its knees by brute force, or, god beware, poorly optimized code.
This includes ports of applications written for completely different (higher spec'd) systems, or our beloved emulators.
(
don't get me wrong -- the Pandora has some pretty good emulators but these things always need at least 5..10 times more HW resources than the platform they are trying to emulate)
What we need is more _native_ applications, IMHO.
Anyways, the other, and maybe even more interesting aspect about the Pandora, IMHO, is that it was designed by "geeks", for "geeks".
By this I mean that a ) it grants you practically unlimited freedom to modify its software and b ) there's no secondary, remote-controllable 'supervisor' OS lurking in the background (
like on many/most/ALL?? mobile phones nowadays).
Its main OS also does not call back home every chance it gets to report the user's activities or even forces them to upload all their data to remote "
cloud" servers instead of keeping them on local storage (e.g. SDCards).
To me this feels like one of the last true homecomputers.