Wow, Over A Year Late?

[renegadechic]

I want PS1 and Amiga emulation.

I want to write games for it.

I want to pay about £200.



I can't wait to play Wipeout

gimmie the £200 ill get you a nice tower with XP and a USB controller. can i keep the change?

 

[mali]

My troll sense is tingling.

Stop drinking :lol:

 

[Unfathomable Depths]

I want PS1 and Amiga emulation.

I want to write games for it.

I want to pay about £200.



I can't wait to play Wipeout

gimmie the £200 ill get you a nice tower with XP and a USB controller. can i keep the change?

Handheld tower with a USB controller for less than £200?

Deal.

 

[Vitel]

But for me, my expectations have changed a little.

+1

As there's still no proper alternative

Theres still no device that compares to the pandora yet.

That's the main problem. Everybody else does ugly keyboardless tablets :-(
Viliv's devices are interesting, but not pocketable IMHO. I need something smaller.

Not much happened in the last year in the ARM handheld sector.

Looking at the recent events like E3 and CES, I don't see much anything to indicate the obsoletion of the Pandora. It still has quite the edge over the PSP and NDS, isn't a locked down system, and has a great community behind it. Oh, and the hardware is still above standard, and should be for about 1-2 more years. I'm not panicking.

You probably missed the Cortex-A9 based devices. I really want to see an announce of a pocketable clamshell device based this processor.

 

[torpor]

Its all about the nubs, for me. And the love. The Pandora has had a lot of love put into it, imho, so I cannot wait to get my hands on. I'm happy knowing that things are progressing and that MP is just a few more weeks away ..

 

[krosfyah]

I think the problem is more to do with anticipation than anything else. Back in 2008, it was a much more impressive piece of kit and there were no thoughts of anything else coming close for a while. Whereas now, even though there still isn't anything else that comes close, just the sheer fact that it's 2 years later makes it feel like there might be more impressive devices just around the corner.

 

[Awakening]

What we want to do with our gadgets will determine what we will by. For me the Pandora is the perfect emulation device, but if that was all I wanted I would have bought a Dingoo and be happy. I'm a board game designer and I want to work on my Pandora. The Pandora might not be as work friendly as a notebook but when I sit down in front of my laptop I can just feel the inspiration and motivation evaporate. I don't design games full time and most work is not done on a computer anyway. I have also programmed quite a lot over the years and I've always wanted to code for a portable console, since the Pandora is open source and have game controls it will be perfect for me. I do wonder whether or not coding on the Pandora will be comfortable considering screen and keyboard size, but still something to code for and I have worked on a game development software before that would be nice to have running on Pandora.

Primary things I will do on my Pandora is emulation, design work and surfing the Internet. No other portable device even compares when it comes to these three areas combined. In the pocketable market it might even be the best in each individual category right now. I can bring the Pandora with me wherever I go, without having to pack a bunch of stuff with me, and I can just pick it up and use wherever I might be (maybe not on the beach).

 

[grasshoppir]

its been too damn long, im dissapointed with the open pandora team but i havent cancelled so i think it's been worth the wait! i knew their roadmap was very optimistic to say the least

@cobaltage btw ben heck and other white trash engineers can stick it where the dremel wont reach

 

[Chip]

You probably missed the Cortex-A9 based devices. I really want to see an announce of a pocketable clamshell device based this processor.

Faster is always better, but I don't see what these new chips would provide that the OMAP 3530 doesn't. OK, so web pages would load a bit faster, and you might be able to play slightly higher bitrate videos, but it's not as though there would be a whole new category of software that you could run on an A9 that you can't on an A8. I'll be able to do everything I want to do on the Pandora as-is. I won't be able to do everything I want to do on any of the new A9/Snapdragon devices because they weren't designed with both gaming and general computing in mind.

 

[Vitel]

Faster is always better, but I don't see what these new chips would provide that the OMAP 3530 doesn't. OK, so web pages would load a bit faster, and you might be able to play slightly higher bitrate videos, but it's not as though there would be a whole new category of software that you could run on an A9 that you can't on an A8. I'll be able to do everything I want to do on the Pandora as-is. I won't be able to do everything I want to do on any of the new A9/Snapdragon devices because they weren't designed with both gaming and general computing in mind.

I want to use the Gentoo distro on my Pandora. So compilation time is _very_ important for me. A9 will be 2 times faster than A8. That's a big deal...

 

[mali]

A9 is still future, imo. Who knows when the first devices will come out and especially in which formfactor. 7"+ seems to become mainstream. For couch surfing it's very good but it's barely a handheld. I've posted a video of the Nvidia showcase in the CES thread in off topic

 

[Sphinxter]

No change here. Be sure and stop by next year.

 

[kloplop321]

My only expectation that has changed is for the OS to be better and the nubs to be better than originally thought(in terms of how they feel and move).

 

[aesir911]

i believe if it doesn't come out by march this year, it never will...

 

[RajTakhar]

i think the nearer it gets to easter 2010 and we still dont see a panda - more and more people will want refunds

I was contemplating it myself pre-xmas this year (no not the year before)

Instead i got something else to occupy me for a bit (before the panda becomes main event) - an old laptop which I turned into a mac/red-hat box

With the other Arm based devices such as the tablet on a keyboard thingy and that tablet only device - the pandora will get competitors eventually - and we all want something now

I really am hoping the wait (and what a wait) was worth it - otherwise I'll get the revamped Wiz from GPH

 

[DAP]

I have a theory:
If the engineers & management truly understood how much time & effort were required to design something new, the project would get canceled before it got started.
If they actually know how much time & effort it will take, they must have done it before, so it is not something new. (e.g. building a bridge).

 

[silver]

Pandora is still - just about - hitting the sweet spot, although less so than since the original "world's fastest handheld" - I doubt it is anymore.

Nvidia has made a Tegra 2 SOC - Dual Cortex-A9, and six other chips (Image/HD decode/HD encode/Audio/Gfx/Arm7) all in one SoC. Very low power consumption. I'd love to see one of these tied to a device with pandora like controls...

http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3714&p=2

 

[Vitel]

A9 is still future, imo.

As well as Pandora is. I guess that the first A9-based devices will be released this year.

 

[aq21]

Person A. Hey, would you like 10 marbles in one month?
Person B. Sure, that'd be great!
[... two years ...]
Person B. Hmm, my expectations have risen now, I'm expecting those 10 marbles to be 20 marbles!
Person A. Why the hell would you expect that?

Steve

Fixed that for you.

 

[hch]

i'm a first day preorderer and i swore i'm in it for real no matter how long it takes. also, the 128->256MB RAM upgrade happened during the wait and was quite essential. i'm looking forward to the pandora a lot, but....

i have now preordered (yeah, i'm learning resistant) a umid BZ, which is really the device for my personal needs. it has 3g, a larger screen resolution, vga out and a bit more ram and - as much as i hate to admit that it is an advantage - an x86 cpu. so that's the machine i'll probably end up using, but who knows. maybe the pandora will beat that thing.

anyways, i meanwhile am so used to browsing these forums that i am already thinking i'll miss it once the device arrives. was quite some experience and on another level - as i am professionally involved quite a bit in a project with custom hardware design - it is very interesting for me to watch the progress of this one. also, i do not fear for the pandoras relevance. as a console that is. there is no competition in sight. a year ago or so i was grinding my teeth because there was the remote possibility that with an early 09 release it would have scored a lot outside this niche market. it then would have been the only reasonable pocket computer, the only new gen arm device with keyboard, the only small computer with 10+ hours of battery life. well, that is over now. the new netbook generations, the smartbooks, the netwalker. a lot of stuff has happenedsince then. now it will probably be good, but not astonishingly so. as a console it will have quite some lifespan still (this christmas there was a ps3, an xbox360 and a wii among the christmas presents of my nephews and nieces and it was considered cutting edge by all of them) and as i understood the team never aimed higher and even was kind of afraid about a too large scale success.

ah, should stop rambling, nobody is interested in this crap anyway.