So... I have my pandora for 3 days now. I'm well chuffed
When I opened the box the unit was very cold. Combined with the weight it felt like the Pandora was made of Metal. Awesome!
I wanted to charge it before using it but not after trying the buttons of course. All felt great except for the left shoulder button. It didn't have any travel, felt stuck and didn't click. Later on after booting the machine I found out that it did sort off work but I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed that my machine wasn't perfect.
Out of the box the software felt a sluggish and 'crashy' (Midori) and the SD card / PND system seemed dodgy.
I'll try to explain....
It happened a couple of times that starting some software did nothing. A reboot of the machine solved that problem but there seemed to be some memory leak issue somewhere.
Firefox stopped working altogether as it said it already had an instance running. Later on Midori did the same and crashed a couple times more.
The latest firefox Beta PND didn't show up on my desktop at all and Chromium opened a new tab for every link that I clicked. Needs some work
Besides that I had to remove the battery a couple of times too as the system didn't close down on it's own. After counting down it just returned to the desktop.
As far as the SD card/PND system goes, I'm having some issues. Every now and then the SD doesn't seem to mount. I have to remove the SD card and re-insert it and if that doesn't work, use the 2nd SD slot.
My SD card apparently did have some file system errors (Came out of my WIZ) so I thought that might have been the problem. I formatted it, installed ED's latest firmware beta update and that made all the difference. The machine seems much more solid now although it still doesn't recognize the SD in one go every now and then.
As I had some time and decent tools at work I decided to open up my Pandora to check what was up with the shoulder button. First thing that I noticed when opening it up was that the case is being held toogether by 2 screws under the battery only. The other screw holes are unused. Does that have a specific reason? Because that does explain why the system isn't as solid as it can be. Anyway, I opened it up and found that the right shoulder had a small foam sticker on it and the left one didn't. I reassembled the unit, constantly checking the clicking of the shoulder button but each time when I click-snapped the case together the button slid off the micro switch or something.
As I didn't have anything near that resembled the foam sticker I ended up cutting a little square of Gaffa tape which I stuck on the button. After a couple of tries I finally managed to assemble the Pandora with a proper working shoulder button. Just missing 3 screws now...
I'm very happy now but it felt like the unit was assembled to hastily. Also the latest firmware should have been on the machine from the beginning imo. First impressions are the most important ones so the product should be delivered as good as it can be I think.
Some software comments, out of the top of my head;
Ginge: Awesome!
Too bad the touchscreen doesn't work though
Mupen64plus: I only tried Mario 64 and it works like a charm! More awesomeness!!
PicoDrive: Works a charm!
SNES9x: Happy!
UAE4ALL: Can't get it to work, I get a flickering screen. I need to look into it better I guess
Vice64: Works great! Have to disable the joystick mapping in vice to be able to use the dpad as cursor keys.
gbSP: Great emu! Nice to play some of the old SP games again. Too bad the gbSP menu can't be mapped to the Pandora button instead of the Y button.
Scumm: Yeeeehaaaaaa!
scummVM. Works great
Panjoust: Great game but couldn't find a way to quit it in a normal way. The quit box showed up but I couldn't click it.
Quake3: Has some control issues when accidentally touching the left nub. Too hard to play atm but that might be me failing.
Giana: Nice classic but I prefer the Commodore 64 version
Some software issues I ran into:
There are no GUI sounds so I don't know wether I really double clicked. I can't see wether the machine is busy doing anything or not.
I didn't find a task manager of some sort that shows background apps and enables me to kill tasks that are stuck or something.
Some of the windows are too big for the screen which makes it difficult to click buttons on the bottom.
I really miss some sort of keyboard mapping tool as well as a tool to manage SD cards, copy from slot 1 to 2, format etc. (Can probably be done in the terminal but I'm no hardcore Linux user so will have to learn how to use that)
I can't find a way to set file associations to VLC for instance. VLC doesn't play video streaming from the web. Not when opening an AVI directly and not when opening a playlist file with an url in it. (does work on my windows and ubuntu systems)
There's probably a lot more to improve like a uniform key layout and GUI for all the different software and such but I'm sure that can be realized in the future.
Well.. that's my first impressions for now, I need some more time to check out all the other goodies. I have confidence in the community that the software will only get better.
Conclusion:
The Pandora is a tinker machine and I'm a Tinkerer so I'm a happy camper. My wife not as much though
