usability

[Bosbeetle]

There is a big discussion going on in the dev section about usability. Now I dont want to open the can of worms of that discussion here but I like to know (and it might be insightfull for devs)


Where did you struggle to understand the pandora or how it worked or to get something to work.


(please give simple anwers)


So to start myself, the only thing I really had to struggle for is thethering my pandora via bluetooth to my symbian^3 phone. (since it doesnt use the the easy does it protocol apparently)

 

[slaeshjag]

Not really, but I spent a good week on reading _EVERYTHING_ I could find about the pandora before I got it.

 

[Bosbeetle]

Oh there is one other thing, finding games.


Some programs get ordered with other (in the xcfe menu) and I don't get the order, it seems to be alphabetical first for capital letters than for lower case letters. Made me look for games at wrong places. (example eduke32 is somewhere at the bottom)

 

[ZXDunny]

The only thing I needed to know was where to put PND files - and that took me all of five minutes in Google. After that it was directly into MiniMenu (and from there I made XFCE the default UI), and I've not looked back since. I strongly suspect that all of craig's "usability" complaints are because he needs to sell more units, and therefore needs to target the iPhone crowd. Which he can't because the iPhone wipes the floor with the Pandora for the vast majority of those that want an iPhone.


D.

 

[ckblackm]

The biggest thing for me was figuring out how the battery charging was supposed to work... once I figured out that it was


working as intended... I was ok.

 

[ChaosWarmech]

As far as setting it up I've had virtually no problems, but I did a lot of preparing before I got it. (Had my SD Cards set up two weeks early). And have been on the forums every day since ordering.


Edit: I did have some problems with mupen64, but was able to fix it with about 30 minutes of fiddling around. /edit


I do have problems the nubs though. The don't always work properly and I have to reset them and play with them for awhile. We need a better way to calibrate them!!

 

[elinscheid]

I have had no real problems using my Panda yet. I think a lot of problems were ironed out before mine shipped. The only complication I am having is figuring out where to place data files for certain games that I've installed. This is not an issue specific to the Pandora of course, I had to learn where to place data files for other systems in the past.


One annoyance I have had so far is that I can't seem to get the documentation files to load up. They appear to be linked to Arora and almost every time I try to open one of them up the bottom of the window says Failed to Load. So this forces me to browse the webs and forums looking for information about the application. Perhaps if I were to change the browser associated with the documentation files then I might have better luck.


Anyway, my little hand-held computer is rock solid and I love it to death.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Check this out, then.

 

[Nintendo]

The Pandora Wiki made life easier for me, so all-in-all I had no problems whatsoever.

 

[Tom`]

WizardStan mentioned this in another thread, but USB mass-storage mode could be improved - it's not obvious how it works, and in my experience it only works about half the time anyway.