My thoughts after a few days:
Well, by now I have had the pandora half a week. I have more or less carried it with me the whole time - Not on the whole time, but, you know, whenever you have ten minutes to kill during the day, you just naturally bring out your pandora, eh? The instant-ish on/off into low power mode is excellent here, combined with the fact that it resumes exactly where I left off - So if I am in the middle of a level in Super Mario World when I turn the pandora off and leave the train, I will still be there 5 minutes later when I'm seated on the bus.
It is an excellent conversation starter, as confirmed in my workplace today. Granted, I work with geeks (lecturer at university computer science department), but still. Together with my slightly older HP 9810a, I can now outconfuse just about anyone
Controls: Superb. The DPad is excellent. I endured the GP2x stick, and actually got quite proficient at wrestling it into the approximate direction I wanted, so it is proven that my standards for what is acceptable is shamefully low, but this plays in a different league altogether. I haven't tried any fighting games yet, which really are the acid test, but this is indeed up there with the very, very best. People tend to tout the Snes or Saturn pads as the best there are, and, well, compared to the SNES and Saturn controllers lying in a box behind me, this wins hands down. Granted, those are by now old and worn, so the comparison is not entirely fair, but still. Buttons (shoulder and face) are very good, after I reseated the foam pad of my right shoulder button. My B button has a somewhat different feel than the others, and I suspect it is the same thing as a few others have reported, so in the future I'll probably open it up and "remove a little bit of excess plastic", as others have described. But that would be mostly a cosmetic (or whatever the tactile version of that is - Feeletic?) thing, because it triggers just as well as the others. The keyboard works well enough - I haven't used it very much yet.
Is it not bad that I had to open it up to fix that foam pad? No, it is excellent, and this is why: Every production of gadgets have errors. Some have less errors (something that might be achieved with automatised assembly lines and test jigs, and profit margin enough to simply toss any unit that fails at any test), some have less, but all have errors. The important bit is what happens when errors appear - is it 1) "Tough shit - you bought it", 2) "Send it back and we will fix it. Eventually. Possibly. Unless you've fiddled with it. And then we will send it back to you. Eventually." or 3) "Ok, that sounds like it might be that error. Try this procedure". Now, granted, I would be a card-carrying member of the "If you can't open it, you don't own it" mob had I not disassembled the card to see if there was any nifty electronics inside, but to me number 3 is by far the most preferred reply, and I would probably prefer 1 over 2. I hate forced downtime of something just because the company who built the thing assumes that all their customers are incompetents. To me, this approach of actually trusting that the end user is capable of solving simple things is Very Important.
The rest of the physical aspects seem solid and as expected. My hinge stays open in almost any position, my LEDs light up, my switches switch and my connectors connect. I haven't quite figured out the wifi bit yet - Something is not working, but I haven't had time to look into it yet. My WiFi router has proven to be a bit choosy before, so there is a need of some testing.
The system (XFCE) is...well, I have been a casual linux user for a decade now, I've used XFCE before (on an old laptop with slackware on it), I use Ubuntu and Fedora gnome setups daily and have dallied in a bunch of others. So to me, it feels very comfortable. By this, I do not mean that it works exactly as I would like (yet...), but it responds to my gentle proddings in ways that makes sense to me - When something irks me I know where to start looking for a solution, and what degrees of freedom I can expect (This is in total opposition to Windows systems, which always seems to hide its tweaks in the place furthest from where I'm looking). We have a friendly relationship, XFCE and I, and we strive together to overcome any misunderstandings we might have
It is a small wonder to me to be able to pop up an Abiword, a Geany or a Dia on that tiny-but-excellent screen.
But we're not here for the word processing, right? We're here for the games. And here, it already excels. I have tried a few of the homebrew games - PandoraPanic is brill in a mad way, Gianas Return is a trip down to the computer club in -89, where the (un-)original Giana was played daily. Just now, I remembered that I really must check that jewelswapping/rpg hybrid thingy that I don't remember the name of right now with decent controls, and decent controls reminded me that W&W might be playable through Ginge? Is it? If so, that is effing brilliant, because that was really a wonderful, wonderful game that one had to struggle to control through that GP2x stick...but I digress. More about that later. Emulation: I have been playing a lot of Super Mario RPG (Snes) these last days, finally with controls that work and at the expected speed. Before that, I started a campaign in Bahamut Lagoon (Snes) and one in Shining Force II, just to get a feel for them. I'll get back to them later. A bit of casual SMB3 (Nes) is never wrong whenever one has a few moments to spare, and I've started up Fuse just to see the nice power-up screen resolve from my childhood. And of course - We all have different parts of the gaming history that is really, really important to us, right? Some of us get mad glee at the first level of Super Mario 64, or get all nostalgic by Last Ninja or Manic Miner or whatever. Anyways, for me, to see the intro, from Aeris in the back alley, zooming back and up and seeing all of Midgar, and then back in, to the train and the terrorists/resistance fighters jumping off and running into that mako reactor...On that screen, in my pocket! And even though there are still slowdowns at the battle intro screens, it is actually, really, playable on this device, on the train or whatever...Pure bliss. Worth the ticket, alone.
Every emulator is not yet super-polished, just as all parts of the OS are not (dialogs that are higher than the screen spring to mind), but that is software. Software, in accordance to its name, changes and adapts and gets better. Already, it is great. In the near future, it will be brilliant.
So, are there no negatives? Well...Yes, of course there is. The fact that a face button is ever-so-slightly iffy is of course a negative point, as is the fact that I haven't so far gotten the wifi running. I could pick on the fact that I haven't yet been able to figure out how to write "Å i åa ä e ö" (not that I have really tried, but...). Little things. If I'm not careful when I hold it, the base corner might rest a bit uncomfortably against the palm of the hand. Given another viewpoint, other things might be negative - It doesn't run windows! It has only one screen! It has a keyboard!
But, for me, this really is the closest yet to The Perfect Gadget.
This does not mean that it would be the perfect gadget for everybody. I'm the kind of guy who has a LG GW620 handset, precisely because it has a physical keyboard, and who wants Android and not iOS (or, heavens forbid, windows phone whatever)
for the exact reason that it allows me to open a terminal and do "df -h" to check the filesystem or that it allows me to write my own apps. Not that I write any apps, mind. But I'm allowed to, even encouraged. That is a very different mindset from someone who wants "the seamless experience" of an iSomething, or the big-name gloss and AAA titles of a Sony PlayLatest. That is the mindset of someone who wants a Perfectly Realised Object. That is not the pandora. The pandora is a Box of Possibilities.
All these little things. Seq24 is packaged as a PND, so if I get hold of a small USB-MIDI-interface, I might bring my favorite sequencer with me whenever inspiration strikes! Or, that might be Atari ST DR T's...But I can run that too, under Hatari! And, of course, those RPGs that I never got to finish because I got kids (they are a timesoak. A wonderful timesoak, but still) - I can play them on the commute! And I just now looked at the pandora and remembered that there is a microphone on there, and suddenly my mind starts "Hey, that would be nifty for...". All these "Wait, why don't you try..." things pop up, over and over again.
This turned out a lot longer than I thought. Guess I'm just a happy customer :lol: . Or, more correctly: A happy user. There is an important distinction there - The person I am prefers to be the user and operator of his gadgets.