Pandora - Viable Testbed Platform/community For Commerical Dev?

[Prophet]

I was just looking over the PowerVR SGX info (http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/products/Graphics/SGX/index.asp) and it occured to me that the Pandora could be a nice testing platform for professional 3D handheld game development. It would have a small, technically inclined community of users - a perfect team of unpaid but enthusiastic testers.

So I wonder - would it be attractive for professional teams to use the Pandora as a testbed? Releasing concept builds of games, and/or even betas and even RC's as they approach final builds for commercial platforms (i.e. PSP, DS, phones etc.)?

Just a thought... I know we have a few such people around here, so I wonder what they think?

I realize the Capcoms and EA's of the world aren't going to do such a thing, but for smaller independent devs and contractors, it might be a fun and useful way to test ideas and code on a small hobbyist community.

 

[Tobriand]

This crossed my mind too, albeit in a slightly different way. I see there being two things commercial houses may see in the Pandora:

1) Too much competition on a device where most people are re-discovering retro-games, and not so retro emulated games (N64, Psx) that look nice on a small screen, thus not bothering with it.

2) Pandora as a testbed, because the CPU it uses should be the one that the high-end mobile industry uses in the next 2-3 years, and therefore this is a very useful platform to guage how your code will run on more mainstream handsets (even if they don't run the OMAP chip at full power).

 

[dabomb3627]

one can only hope. i know an indy dev who made a silent hill type game based off the quake engine for the windows CE platform, i'll try and convince him to make a pandora (and maybe even gp2x) port.