Tempel, Skeezix, and I met today for lunch and had a grand ol' time breaking his Pandora. Skeezix reminded us several times that not only was it the prototype case and board, but he'd also opened it up several times and kind of broken things. His LCD cable, for instance, had cracked in the repeated disassemble/reassemble process, resulting in a forever blue tinted screen. Unfortunate, but things like that are to be expected. I've got some video that may or may not be interesting that I'll post up later. See, I thought I was clever. I had a brilliant idea to get around the whole "so hard to play and take video at the same time" problem. I picked up a pair of spy glasses with a camera built into the bridge! The camera sees what I see, no need to mess with lenses and stuff. Except, upon viewing the recorded video, I realized that I was looking down with my eyes more than my head, so all the video I took has the Pandora at the very bottom of the screen, when it's even visible at all. Sorry, I'm a slouch.
I'll do my best to assemble something that looks good tonight or tomorrow.
ONWARD! To a review of sorts.
First impression: it's bigger than I expected, thicker especially. At first I was worried about it, but after handling it for a few minutes, it actually felt a lot more comfortable. My DS now feels too small in comparison. The extra size makes it seem to fill your hands, like a large sammich. I don't really know how to explain it. I put my fingers around it and they fit. With my PSP and DS, I have to curl my hand slightly to get the same kind of grip.
The keys are shiny, bubbly, when you squish them they go straight down, no wiggle. I was constantly looking at the keys to remember where certain keys were (such as the /, ~, and -), but I imagine this will change with usage. Regular typing was pretty easy and only took a little bit to get used to. The location of the space bar is about the only thing I imagine anyone will have any problem with. On a fullsized keyboard I'll hit it with whichever thumb is convenient, but here it has to be the right thumb. More than once I found myself trying to press the B key with my left thumb. Practice!
The nubs! Oh my! Tactile and responsive. You can see in a video later Quake 3 being played with the nubs and I didn't completely suck, just mostly. The nubs moved smoothly, and snapped back when released. I think "frictionless" is the right word, or as close as possible. They just moved when pushed, didn't resist at all. I liked it!
I didn't get as much play with the D-pad as I could have. It felt good. Played Giana's return a bit, it worked smoothly, didn't scrape or poke my fingers. I can believe this would be good for extended play.
The sound was also a lot quieter than I had expected. I knew it wouldn't be able to fill a room or anything, but I expected to be able to hear a little better than I did. That pub wasn't exactly loud, and it was hard to hear sometimes. What I could hear was nice and clear though, including video and MP3 playback. Not a real problem, that's what headphones and the line out on the EXT port is for, just don't expect you and a couple friends to be able to sit around and watch something without some kind of external speaker.
This was the first time I'd run jzintv and Dink Smallwood on an actual Pandora and it made me very, very happy. They just worked. It was beautiful! That should demonstrate how easy it is to code for the Pandora if you're coming from a PC background. They're both simple SDL apps and they just worked. A little bit of keyboard mapping and they'll be perfect.
Yes, there is an outline on the lid of the case, that square that has been pointed out, but under a flat light it disappeared. I could only see it when looking at an angle. It might also be visible under brighter light, but it is faint enough that I can see the finish making it disappear. That's my hope anyway. If it doesn't, it's not that bad. Not perfect, but still very good.
I also went looking for other anomalies. The plastic, in general, was not perfect. There were spots where it was slightly more dull than others, but again, only under the right light. These should disappear with the finish (knock on wood). The "dent" on the right side of the keyboard we've seen in other pictures wasn't there, and I didn't see any sign of shrinkage around the side. I ran my finger along the seam all the way around the edge and it was smooth. Under the battery, however, was some very noticeable distortion. It almost looked like it was stressed and ready to crack. You may be able to see it in the video, we'll see if I got it. This is a prototype, I've got faith that the stress has already been taken care of. I hope.
I didn't see any ghosting, even when I was told I should be seeing ghosting. I do see ghosting on my PSP1000, so any ghosting on the Pandora is not as bad as on the PSP1000. I'm sure there is some there, but how many people it will actually affect has yet to be determined.
Both XFCE and Jeff's minimal menu felt very familiar and intuitive. The touch screen needs a bit of fuzzy logic for the double tap. I was only able to actually double tap an icon a few times, all the other times I gave up and just hit enter. The problem seems to be that it only counts a double tap if you're tapping the exact same pixel twice in a row. Really, it should have a reasonable dropoff, say 10 pixels on any side. The fact that I got it a couple of times proves it works, it just needs to be less sensitive.
I started Abiword, it came up fast. Happy happy, type away, "Hellollo" in big, bold, underlined, italic letters. This will serve all your rapid note taking needs, once you get used to the keyboard.
Obviously we didn't test the wifi, but Tempel did accidentally start Midori. It loaded pretty quickly, 3 tabs open, one of which was the list of recently used tabs in windows thing. He scrolled it up and down, it was smooth. Here's hoping the wifi gets solved.
We stress tested the hinge, giving it a hard twist. It squeaked, as old plastic tends to do, but it didn't seem like it was going to give. My DS, in contrast, I just gave a twist and I'm fairly confident I could rip the screen off if I wanted to.
I don't know what else I can say. Is it worth the wait? I think it is. It does everything I wanted it for (excepting wifi) back in May 2008, and there is no one device that matches it.
Is it worth the hype? That's a tricky one, but only because the last year has seen more and more hype built on it. When everyone finally does get theirs, there will be a huge fanfare, followed by a collective "now what?". I just hope the response will be big enough to generate enough momentum to carry them through a few more batches.
