Preformance/Usability questions

[Vonn]

First of all; Howdy to everyone in the forums. I've been thinking of getting a Pandora for a while, so I thought I should finally sign up on the forums.


I was curious about how usable this device is for things like Pidgin, or flash-based web services. Any basic insight from people who have, and use either of these features will be welcome.


For instance: How many conversations can you have open in Pidgin before the unit starts to lag or notably losses performance? How well does flash run, if at all(including the deboot of Debian)? Is the thumb typing comfortable for extended periods of time (read: 3-4 hours)? How pocket able is the device? Would it fit into a loose pair of jeans front pocket? Can it really be used as a UMPC? And finally, if anyone has tried, how well does Eclipse run on it?


I've seen the video of the Pandora being used to run Org, The GIMP, and Pidgin, but those were for very short periods and nothing more demanding then a single window. As much as I'm looking to buy the Pandora as a gaming device, I'm also very excited by it's potential to be a UMPC without a disgusting distro on it. I realize the focus for the device is on gaming, and therefor am not expecting the greatest UMPC available, but any advice would be helpful.


Thanks in advance,


Vonn.

 

[Vonn]

Thanks for the speedy response, Alerino. Good information!

 

[jbr]

Ah, this is a very informative thread!

At stock speed (500mhz), music might stutter a bit in deadbeef, if you are opening a heavy webpage (maybe it will run better with other application), but i usually OC to 700 ou 800mhz to make things faster and smoother.

This part, however, bothers me a little. I assume this means that music playback is still being done software-only, and that being the case, I know I can't expect performance to be exceptional, but does anyone know if MP3 decoding (for example) is going to be able to be moved over to that wonderful DSP any time soon?


Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but I had been under the impression that the pandora's SOC included a nice DSP (digital signal processor) which could be used to decode some audio and video codecs without straining the main processor (just like on an iPhone, for example).


Right now, it sounds like the code to do that just hasn't been written yet, but am I correct in assuming that something like this is coming down the line?

 

[Prometheus]

It should be coming somewhere down the line, but I don't know (or don't recall - I'm unsure right now if it's been mentioned) when that will be. I gather that, basically, a newer kernel version is required, and that will probably take a fair bit of testing.

 

[gruso]

I can't say 'soon' because I have no idea, but DSP utilisation is something we can expect down the track, yes.


[edit] Prometheus'd.

 

[Yannick]

At stock speed (500mhz), music might stutter a bit in deadbeef, if you are opening a heavy webpage (maybe it will run better with other application), but i usually OC to 700 ou 800mhz to make things faster and smoother.

Thats just a buffer underrun, try using some more buffer in deadbeef. the only thing the OC does is finishing the blocking task faster. doesn't do anything to *speed up* mp3 playback. webbrowsers are mofo conserning sharing pc resources (looking especially at you firefox)


or use a faster SD card, the browser writes to SD card wile deadbeef wants to read an mp3