YAPR


Awesome, I want the A/V cables for mine. Wondering about those..
 
Good review. Nothing too scary and nothing unexpected. Just cranks up the unbearable waiting another notch. Thanks.
 
interesting opinions on the firmware and emulators, and this is one of those matter of opinion issues i guess. a lot of people will adore the freedom that an open and more generic OS gives them. they will also love the variety of places emulators come from. variety inspires creativity and stops it getting stagnant. i do appreciate that some people may want something more specific and streamlines and i dare say that android will make its way eventually.


out of interest, did you ever try mini menu?


good review though :)
 
Good review :)


I am fully agreeing with most of your point on the hardware: It's really nice little device and has the best control (keyboard + nubs + dpad + shoulder button) you can find on this type of devie.


I have to say I don't share the same opinion for the OS though. XFCE isn't exactly the slickest experience for somebody not familiar to Linux... but at the same time it's great to have a full system for linux geek. Also, there are a lot of emulator and hoemebrew for linux (and applications!). With the current OS it is easy to port application. If you want you can have a chrooted Debian and install ton's of application (openoffice, gimp...).


Android is really a totally different beast and diverges quite a lot from a standard Linux desktop. I believe that it would be a lot more difficult to port a lot of the existing Linux software. As a secondary OS it would definitely be interesting though.


As to reinventing the wheel, the Pandora OS is based on Ångström. I would say it's actually Google that is re-inventing the wheel with Android but that's another thing I guess.


The point is that I believe a lot of the developer feel at ease messing with the current OS because it is just a plain standard Linux. I am pretty sure Android will be more problematic.


Meego would potentially be a much better starting point if you want a sleeker experience while keeping a lot of standard linux element underneath. But the future is meego is quite uncertain now and it's probably not really ready either.


I believe the team made a good choice with Ångström but I agree it might to be for everyone (and it's certainly not as flashy as android...). Just for gaming, using only minimenu should be good enough though.
 
Actually, I found the Angstrom/Xfce combo to be very comfortable. This is from a Windows XP user.
 
The complaints about the user interface of emulators not being the same is a bit unfair to me. Name a desktop system where the emulators all have a uniform user interface. I know none. Different "vendors", different interfaces. That should not have come as a surprise. That being said, front-ends and launchers are being developed which may eventually unify the emulator interfaces to a large extend.


I know you are a strong proponent of Android and I'm just going to have to disagree with you on this. The regular full-desktop experience is the best part of the Pandora for me.


While I agree with you that the Pandora isn't more power-efficient in any way than other devices and other devices would probably have equal or better battery life if they had the same battery capacity, the important point here is that they don't have the same capacity (or a much larger form factor). Though your comment on the standby mode is valid.


These points aside, a good and fair review.
 
I don't mind the differences in emulator frontends, actually. And most emulators for often have similar default interfaces, at least for Windows; the generic drop-down menu at the top. (The official MAMEUI is a notable exception.) For PCs, this works well. For game consoles? Not so.
 
Blue Protoman said:
I view it as both. My statement still stands, though.
Click to expand...
I'm keep being both surprised and impressed with how quickly you always respond to posts :)


I don't want to derail the thread too much about this point, but you merely postulated your statement without any evidence to back it up. Please enlighten me to the reasons why.


The main reason I see why it would not work well on consoles is the lack of expressive power in the input devices and perhaps a higher degree of computer illiteracy of its average user (though I'm not sure about that one). Neither of these hold for the Pandora.


Don't get me wrong, uniform interfaces are nicer (unless it leads to a lack of configurability). I just don't see the must and I certainly don't want to force lots of standards onto the hobbyist coders on which we rely for our software (remember, many of them do this for fun).
 
Let me start by stating that I am not an expert in OMAP power management but have done some research in this area...


Virtually all of the TI OMAP power saving features are not currently utilized including SmartReflex and Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS). The chip can be configured to have various power profiles based on various logic to control which components are even powered. The setup of these profiles can start to get pretty complex depending on how customized you want to get with it which is probably why none of this has been done yet.
 
renegadechic said:
out of interest, did you ever try mini menu?
Click to expand...
I did, and that's what I use primarily, however the window manager for X desktop still seems to be present within some of the applications I tested. It looks to be sitting on XFCE or at least making some calls to it or something. It was about a half/half thing, for example mupen64 uses what appears to use XFE, and when changing clock speed you see the x desktop windows. Some applications have totally stripped any signs such as picodrive or snes9x4p, but a lot have not. Regardless, I had to whip out the stylus on multiple occasions because either the nubs got taken over for mouse control or the dpad quit working for navigation.


@the topic of android- I'm not going to argue that one any further. The way I feel is the way I feel, you don't have to agree with me, but I have enough experience with the subject to know it would be a good fit, and it would solve a lot if not all the problems I had mentioned with the software uniformity and polish, application installation and updates.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
johnsongrantr said:
I did, and that's what I use primarily, however the window manager for X desktop still seems to be present within some of the applications I tested. It looks to be sitting on XFCE or at least making some calls to it or something. It was about a half/half thing, for example mupen64 uses what appears to use XFE, and when changing clock speed you see the x desktop windows. Some applications have totally stripped any signs such as picodrive or snes9x4p, but a lot have not. Regardless, I had to whip out the stylus on multiple occasions because either the nubs got taken over for mouse control or the dpad quit working for navigation.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure if it runs on top of Xfce, but it most certainly runs on top of the X window system. You can not strip out X without reimplementing a large part of what is in X. I can imagine that it would shine through in some applications, especially those not written with mini-menu in mind.


Just checked Snes9x. Yes, it reuses a standard GUI library (GTK) rather than implementing its own, so it WILL look like your desktop environment (which is based on GTK widgets). It's not really Xfce you see, snes9x just looks like that.


A separation between the actual emulator and the front-end to control it would be nice but requires twice as much work on the front-end side. I expect that most programmers will opt to reuse as many of the standard libraries instead. This holds especially for ports.
 
Caine said:
Blue Protoman said:
I view it as both. My statement still stands, though.
Click to expand...
I'm keep being both surprised and impressed with how quickly you always respond to posts :)


I don't want to derail the thread too much about this point, but you merely postulated your statement without any evidence to back it up. Please enlighten me to the reasons why.
Click to expand...

Simple. Not only can it do many things that a netbook (and even some larger computers) can do, but it can play many games very well.
 
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