Pandora Console Ready For Pre-Orders

Croakyvoice writes "Finally, months after the official announcement, 3,000 lucky people can now pre-order Pandora, possibly the world's fastest handheld console. It boasts a processor capable of up to 900 MHZ, PowerVR 3D graphics, a large 800x480 LCD touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, dual SD card slots, TV out, dual analogue and digital controls, a clamshell DS Lite-style shape, and a 43-button mini keyboard. The console already boasts an amazing amount of ready-for-release software such as Ubuntu and many full-speed emulators for systems such as Snes, Amiga, Megadrive, and many more that are not publicly announced yet. The console is as powerful as the original Xbox and on a par with the Nintendo Wii. Those interested should visit OpenPandora.Org. For the full history of Pandora from inception until the present, check out the Pandora Homebrew Site."

What part of this advertisement is news???

It boasts a processor capable of up to 900 MHZ,

It is 'possibly' the world's fastest console.

It "boasts" an amazing amount of ready-for-release software such as Ubuntu and many full-speed emulators

The console is as powerful as the original Xbox and on a par with the Nintendo Wii.

All this, and we are lucky to pre-order???

Lisa: They can't seriously expect us to swallow that tripe.
Skinner: Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat
Council, please help yourself to this tripe.

Re:

Though the real successor of the GP2x is the Wiz:
http://gp2x.co.uk/ [gp2x.co.uk]

And the difference is smaller between those. I'd take the Pandora over the Wiz though, except for form factor maybe. The resolution of the Pandora is the best part :)

Re:What part of this advertisement is news???

There's also price. Of course pandora has many more features, perhaps a comparison is in order. @#$!@#$ slashdot doesn't support tables, so this is the best I could do :

Pandora

Pandora [openpandora.org]
ARM Cortex-A8 600MHz CPU
128M ram
3D opengl ES 2.0 acceleration
800x480 4.3" touchscreen LCD
Wifi
Keyboard
dual SDHC card (both expansion and storage)
Internal battery and USB charger
$329.99 / £199.99 (Inc VAT) / E249.99 (Inc VAT)

GP2x WIZ

Wiz [gp2x.co.uk]
533Mhz ARM CPU
64M ram
3D opengl acceleration
OLED Touch Screen 2.8" 320x200
No wifi (BUT easy to add because of USB host)
No keyboard (BUT again, easy to add because of USB host)
single SD card (both expansion and storage, 99% sure SDHC card)
Internal battery and USB charger (thank God ! compared to GP2X F-200 this is heaven)

US$ 179.90 (~124.32 EUR) [play-asia.com]

PSP

PSP [about.com]
PSP cpu 333Mhz
32M ram (64M for the psp slim)
3D acceleration (?)
480x272 LCD screen (great screen imho)
Wifi
MS pro duo expansion (expensive, only storage)
Internal battery and USB charger
Probably USB host capability but not useable

US$ 213.99 (179 euro) [amazon.com]

Surprisingly of all these devices it's the PSP that has the largest library of emulators (even a "somewhat playable" n64 emu, something the pandora devs think impossible (read the gp2x forums ... well ... euhm tomorrow should be better, right ?)

As an ebook reader the PSP blows the socks of the WIZ though, even if just because of larger screen, and it is also larger than the pandora, so I wonder.

This list is limited to devices with actual useable gaming controls. The iphone/ipod touch and the nokia n810 are obvious competitors, but lack (decent) gaming controls. Actually the n810 is kinda nice, I ought to try one.

Re:What part of this advertisement is news???

A "console" is something you put under or next-to your TV, along with your VCR, DVR, and Stereo.

A handheld device is more properly termed a "portable", not a console.

Also this news story reads like an advertisement. Remember the Atari Lynx? It was the most-powerful portable of its time (late 80s), and was supposed to kill-off the boring black-and-white Gameboy, because the Lynx had full-color with stereo sound and an ultra-fast processor. Doesn't that just want to make you go "oooo"?

The Lynx flopped.

Don't be surprised if Pandora does too. It takes more than being "the most powerful" to succeed in gaming. In fact, the #1 consoles of the past were actually NOT the most powerful. Atari 2600 was woefully slow; NES was inferior to Sega Master System. PS1 was only 32-bit but still trumped the faster N64. PS2 was weaker than Xbox or Cube, but still came out #1.

I'm sure the Nintendo DS portable will still be #1 for several more years.

Re:What part of this advertisement is news???

PS1 was only 32-bit but still trumped the faster N64.

"32-bit" is a completely meaningless term in this context, just so you know.

Re:

Yeah, because showing me that some consoles can take a longer time proves that this one took an insane short time. Very logical. By that standard I guess developing a video game in 5 years is an insane short time just because DNF is taking more than twice that.

My thumbs hurt just by looking at it.

It's neat, but it doesn't seem to be very ergonomically designed.

Battery life is awesome, apparently.

Battery life is said to be between 10 to 12 hours of normal usage ..

I ordered one. Can't wait to get it, as its got a lot of power and will make a superlative machine for developing music/synthesis/effects application .. plus the odd game or two, of course, lol ..

For those saying "It will Never Take Off", so? As long as Craig&Co. can make a tidy profit selling it as a niche item, it will be awesome anyway - the hardware itself is superlative, and the development scene for this console is like nothing else - even if they only sell a few thousand, thats at least going to give a few thousand people an awesome system to play with.

Don't forget: its totally open. So it won't "die" as long as there are people willing to get one and code for it, for their own purposes. Gizmondo and all that: dead coz Joe Blow Hacker can't code for it, easily. Pandora: Very, very easy to write code for it, so even if there are no commercial entities getting behind it as a mainstream console, it will still be highly useful to those who bought it ..

I always thought slashdotted was a myth

I always thought that a modern slashdot'ting was a myth due to a poor, database-heavy configuration with insufficient oomph behind the servers. Then some git links to gp32x.com which had one of my GP2X ports as the second item on the front page (outside of the top visible screen). So my two-links-deep, petty news item on something vaguely related to the story (a quick recompile for GP2X) makes my traffic for the month of October (i.e. one day) pass my total traffic for the month of September (30 days) within a matter of hours.

God knows what temperature gp32x.com is hitting right now. Strangely, though, my adsense hits/clicks read normal. I *knew* I should have released my other port so that I was in the No.1 spot on that site when Slashdot hit...

MHz myth yet again...

It boasts a processor capable of up to 900 MHZ,

I have a radio... It's capable of more than 10 GHz.

But why would I want a handheld syslog-viewer?

Joking, but it actually did take me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why on earth someone would want a handheld console of all things... I think we Unix geeks had dibs on that word before gamers. :)

Why would you buy this?

rather than a low end netbook? At most you save about 50 euros.

With the netbook you're getting something that will run most older emulators well, and a machine which is more usable for casual net use. I run a big stack of emulators for older consoles on an ancient Toshiba laptop (with a mere Celeron 500) with no problems. With a 1.6GHz Atom, I'd guess Project64 (N64) and ePSXe (Playstation) work well... Anyone out there tried yet?

Andy

Re:Why would you buy this?

Can you put it in your pocket? Does it play like a proper gaming controller? No? Then that's why. Personally I'll have this, the Eee and the DS, all for different uses.

Re:Why would you buy this?

Ding Ding Ding! Ladies and Gentlemen, the netbook has clearly been accepted by the chattering classes! Above this post, with your very own eyes, you can see the classic anti-netbook argument "Why would you buy a netbook rather than this 15 inch laptop with better specs that I got on sale at best buy for less money?" applied to another device, with the netbook as the proposed superior alternative.

Good hardware, bad hardware

Could not connect to the database: Too many connections

If you can make the "world's fastest console", shouldn't you host on at least a "world's somewhat resilient server"?

The box

With a name like that I am just wondering whether I should be opening the box. ;)

Compare to the iPhone

This is so like another console from a few years back (Gizmondo?) that looked like an old-skool gamers dream machine with GPS and whatever else thrown in the mix but ultimately it died a death as it really wasn't of interest to the mass market.

Gizmondo had a lockout chip to keep out homebrewers, which wasn't cracked until after the system was discontinued. Pandora, on the other hand, is designed without a lockout chip on purpose.

Also, its flexibility is its downfall - Joe public won't be able to work out what it is for - it's too much of an 'everything plus the kitchen sink' device.

So are the iPod Touch and the model with a built-in phone, but that's selling like hotcakes.

Re:Limited audience

There were far more reasons as to why the Gizmondo failed......

http://www.gamerevolution.com/images/feature/gizmondo/flow_chart.gif [gamerevolution.com]

The biggest difference between the Gizmondo and the Pandora is that the latter is intended for home-brew only, and is certainly not aimed as a PSP killer. With that in mind, it's hard to see how the Pandora can fail, bring down a large electronics company, destroy a Ferrari Enzo, and lose millions of investors cash in quite the same way as the Gizmondo managed......

Re:Limited audience

This will appeal to geeks and hackers but 99.9% of the rest of the world will never, ever get this on their radar.

But that is exactly it's market. It's a product for a community that already exists and that is already buying it, so it will be a success. Beating nintendo is not the goal, making a great device with features that a few thousand people want is enough of a success, from my point of view. I'm unsure whether it will make enough money to compensate the amount of time spent designing it, but not everything is about the money. I'm sure they actually love the device themselves, say.

Re:

Now if Google implemented their selection of SDL or whatever on Android .. ;D

Would be nice with a more standard platform for emulators and such on the Linux devices instead of multiple ones (I guess they are very easy to port to android anyway though.)

due to cost.

Why oh why can't a device that looks like a potential competitor for a N810 have GPS built-in?

It would raise the bill of materials unacceptably. But it does have two USB ports and two SD slots that could probably be used for SDIO. Enthusiasts will find which GPS dongles work best with Pandora.

Re:No GPS..

Nope, N810 can also act as a (non-powered) USB host, and also has Bluetooth (I'm quite confident, since it talks to my Bluetooth keyboard pretty darned well :-).

N810 has a single rather than dual SDHC slot (the N800 had dual slots, not sure why they dropped that in the N810), slide-out keyboard (rather than clamshell design), and same resolution screen, but lacks the gaming controls and DSP.

N810 runs Maemo Linux (with GTK+ graphics), though I believe a port of Ubuntu is available or in-work, and is about the same price. Looks about the same size.

Biggest difference to me (other than N810 being a third generation device shipping in volume) - N810 has an official Palm Garnet emulator that runs all those games I bought in my Treo days. It'd be a Good Thing is Access would port that to Pandora as well.

They look pretty similar to me. N810 topped Amazon's Electronics best seller list a while back. If Pandora is well-implemented and can get some marketing behind it, it could do well. I hope so - Choice Is Good.

Re:What about...

Battery life is listed as "10+ hours". Thank ARM's non-crack-filled view on how power efficient a chip can be.

Re:

Yeah, because everybody who's into technology is a fat ugly smelly loserly git. That's easily explained by the fact that you have to sell your coolness to the devil to know how to use vi.

Re:

Its actually a Beowulf cluster of these things, powered by a bloke on a bike. This may be the first slashdotting of a human.