jbrodack said:
I don't know about anyone else but I'm sick of seeing craig bad mouth GPH and GP. Evildragon on the other hand even is not completely pleased with them doesn't go into that sort of talk.
Selling their devices is what led to him being able to put out Pandora at all. They paved the way for any open source handhelds. Craig is both riding on any success gp2x had and blaming any problems on GPH.
I don't think he badmouthed them, everything he said was true. Yes a business venture as a distributor of GPH products and a connection to the community that started with the GP32 did help him. But pointing out serious shortcomings so that you can move forward is
NOT the same thing as badmouthing
AireTamStorm said:
Commenting on the shortcomings of their predecessors and stating how they plan to improve upon the previous generation isn't necessarily badmouthing, IMO.
Exactly.
QUOTE
Pocket Gamer: Can you explain how the Pandora came about?
Craig Rothwell: Well, almost all of the open devices of this nature come from Asia and they are not made by gamers or people who are into the computer scene; they are seen as a cash cow to sell to wacky westerners. The problem here is that the attention to detail is poor.
Um, I concur, the GP2X was heavily plagued with power supply issues and poor detail work. The first unit I received failed to register left or up if you tighten the screws in the wrong order on the back, and they weren't all tightened correctly at the factory.
QUOTE
We liked the GP2X and the GP32 but they had their faults; poor controls, strange internal design decisions and the manufacturers not really understanding what people would want to use them for. As a distributor it was frustrating. The culture barrier was hard to get past; what seems like sensible and needed design decisions here in the UK seemed crazy to people in Korea. We reached a deadlock. There was no question about it, if we wanted a fantastic and unique open source machine we would have to go it alone. Thus the crazy adventure started.
The controls really are very poor. It really needed 3-4 AA batteries or a Li-Ion at the power it was drawing, and the internal power circuits were never very robust. Add to that the fact that USB should have been inside (even the average user could add a USB port with a small soldering iron, if they had put it onboard it would have cost only pennies per unit. They redesigned the board about 4 times I know of and never fixed the problem.)
I don't think GPH ever understood the scene here, they were just pleased that orders were flying in, and they wouldn't consider changing to accommodate the users in the English and European countries.
USB was very stupid, they treated that as a Cash cow for sure. It is common knowledge that a powered USB 2.0 hub is under $20, yet they basically sold a powered USB 1.1 hub for $70 when you figure in the weird power supply they made mandatory (even more if you added the second weird power supply to power the GP2X, and of course you couldn't even attach to the GP2X while it was in the hub.)
This accessory was badly demanded for a year and a half before we even got it, and it was very bad quality when we did get it.
QUOTE
We hired a company in China to help us design the PCB and this turned out to be about as bad as our relations with the Koreans. The same problems cropped up – they were just too used to designing generic media players or game systems. They could not get their heads around the Pandora idea and kept trying to change things. But this time we were not for turning, and we sacked them!
So after $20,000 we were back where we started and starting to think maybe the days of the ZX Spectrum and making things here in the UK were dead. Every firm we contacted in the UK either wanted tens of thousands of pounds to even consider the possibility of speaking to us, or thought we were mad.
Then, out of the blue, Texas Instruments emailed us saying they had been watching the project and were interested in having us use their new OMAP3 chip. This was really cutting edge stuff, far more advanced than anything we had expected to be able to get our hands on, and at the same time they put us in touch with a chap called Michael in Canada who was trying to make a small games console himself.
The match was perfect, Michael was a PCB designer without a distributor or investment and were were distributors and coders with money but without a PCB designer. So we got to work quickly.
OMG 20k down the tubes :blink: . That sucks man, I hope you make it back.
I wondered how MWeston figured in, and it is good to hear that Ti is able to work with you for a mutually beneficial goal; their processor is great, and your handheld is the perfect advertising gimmick, it will equate Ti with handheld Gaming and PDA/MID/UMPC markets. Not to mention absolutely stomp the current gaming handhelds for power, quality and resolution all in one go
.
That is an excellent article, Cheers.
I (and many on here), have tried to imagine a perfect re-design of the GP2X to fix all the woes and it is perfectly clear that fixing all the problems would cost much more than the Pandora costs as is.
Li-Ion battery
Better controls
USB built-in
Wifi In-Built
Bluetooth built in.
More processing power (realistically we only dreamed of this, few of us could understand what it would take, and fewer still had the ability).
The Pandora trumps the GP2X soundly. The Wiz? I think they made it clear with their stupid control layout, smaller screen, and continued use of a poor EXT connector coupled with no internal USB and a 2.5mm headphone jack that they still don't want our business. (us being people who wanted to browse the internet on the GP2X and play games properly).
The Wiz should be just the ticket for gamers and homebrew devs who want a pocket open gaming machine, but those of us who want more would always move up. I think this is fine, there should be a big market and scene and plenty of used Wiz consoles for those who want it, or even want both the Pand and the Wiz. Seeing how the consoles are so similar you can practically dev for both at the same time, and people will either be satisfied with Wiz controls, screen, and performance, or they will get a Pandora.
There is a large group who have maybe even priced the addition to a GP2X of the parts that would make it more useful to them, and they see the Pandora as a real value buy, realizing the Wiz isn't much of a step up from the GP2X in all the areas they need.
I sometimes wonder if we will get flooded by orders from people who buy $600 cellphones when they realize that their cellphone doesn't have half the functionality of the Pandora. They could sell their phone and pick up a Pandora and a smaller BT enabled cellphone for the same amount of money and enjoy better internet browsing, better gaming, more free software, etc.
Ditto for buyers of $800-$1,000 mini laptops, when they realize that the Pandora offers similar functionality at less than half the price and a quarter the size, with
4 times the battery life!!
Cheers Craig, and don't let the naysayers get you down.
