Upgrading the Pandora

[BlueGreen]

I've been reading up on the forums every now and then and came across several "Pandora 2" threads/comments. Ignoring the obvious speed/ram increase requests, I've seen some good suggestions things such as a webcam, gps, accelerometer, magnetometer, and 3G/4G mobile broadband modem built into a newer pandora. Of course, building these into the Pandora itself would be a huge hassle and increase the costs and waiting time by quite a bit.


The Pandora already is a very capable device. Need some new hardware? Connect it via USB. Of course, there's a bit of a catch: most usb devices were designed to be plugged into a desktop, laptop, notebook, etc., not a nifty hand-held device like the Pandora. So, it'll probably work, but it probably won't be comfortable to hold or take on the go.


What I think would be a cool solution to this problem would be that after the preorders ship that effort then goes into making official OpenPandora accesories/attachements. These attachments could be molded to fit comfortably and securely to the Pandora without being as awkward as using a generic computer usb equivalent. I'd imagine this approach would have the following benefits:


1. Additional income for the OPT from selling these attachments


2. Ongoing interest in the current Pandora design as it would be easily expandable


3. Low development costs (I imagine for many things it'd just be mostly designing a new case for an existing USB device)


4. Forwards compatibility (That is, if/when a Pandora 2+ is designed, it could keep the shape required to fit the same attachments removing the need to rebuy/redesign them)

 

[DaMummy]

there just arent enough pandoras out to make pandora specific accessories, when you produce an item, the company usually has a minimum amount they are willing to produce, lets say the tv out cables, the minimum they are willing to make are 10k i believe, and thats the smallest OPT could find, so it would be nearly impossible for this to happen, or for there to be any kind of profit out of it, once again, take the pandora for examples, OPT are expecting to actually recoup their cost and actually start making money by batch 3 at earliest, so thats 12k pandoras

 

[lulzfish]

Yeah, that's the problem. (What DaMummy said) If there's 10,000 Pandoras and it takes OPT even a quarter of the effort to design and produce an accessory, and less than 25% of the Pandora base wants it, then they would have been much better off just building loads more Pandoras. And all the production lines are already set up for the Pandora, so there is no more fixed cost for them to just crank out Pandoras and make profit.


Pandora-specific Accessories would cost them too much for design, testing, production run-up, etc., and the possible market is only a subset of the Pandora's market.


The hardware is pretty small, even stuff like the iPhone don't have many addons because they have to stay portable.


I'm excited about homebrew games. And some media conversion / playback tools I'm supposed to be working on. I kind of let my music player sit now that it's working, but I have some interesting features to add soon.

 

[BlueGreen]

Yeah, mass production is a numbers game and it probably is really too early to tell how much demand for stuff like this would be. On the other hand you mention OPT trying to make a profit around or after 12k Pandoras. If the minimum number of attachements that could be made is 10k, then it'd be a matter of guessing when there would be that much demand for it. For instance, if 1 in 4 Pandora owners would want to buy a webcam attachment, then making a webcam attachement would be reasonable if there were 40k+ Pandoras in the wild. I suppose even 1 in 4 sounds a bit high, but being such a specialty item, I imagine there are more people than average interested in getting things like this. Why would the OPT even bother buying 10k tv cables if they didn't expect to sell most/all of them? I'd guess that there must have been a high ratio of people interested in having it all compared to those who just wanted the Pandora.


Now, will there ever be 40k+ Pandoras out in the wild? It'd be cool to see a project like this go that far, but again it's probably too early to tell. Only now is production running smoothly and just recently the instant pandoras have gone on sale. I just think the attachement idea is worth thinking about and seriously considering if Pandora production/sales really build up steam.

 

[Caine]

I agree with you that most of the proposed extensions for the Pandora 2 are better added through USB/bluetooth. However, Pandora specific accessories would just be insanely expensive due to the small market for them.

Now, will there ever be 40k+ Pandoras out in the wild?

I strongly doubt it. If I recall correctly, the GP2X did surpass that number, but these days smartphone competition is a quite strong.