Pandora finally (finally!) gets a ship date and price
By Darren Murph 
posted September 2nd 2008 1:44AM
posted September 2nd 2008 1:44AM
Be still our hearts! After months upon months (upon months) of waiting, the tight-knit team behind the ultra-potent Pandora gaming handheld has finally divulged the information we've been clamoring for: the ARM Cortex A8-powered device will begin shipping before Christmas 2008 for £199.99 in the UK. The first batch will consist of 3,000 units, and the team is hoping that all of those will be sold out before the first one leaves the dock. There's no word on how costly it'll be for Americans, though we're crossing our fingers that it'll sell for a few bucks less than the $360 we find when simply converting pounds to dollars. [Thanks, Andri]
oh my god...will i be able 2 play banjo tooie on this thing that would be epic conker's bad fur day would be 2 (someone reply to confirm that i can do this)!
N64 emulation is definitely possible, and a well known developer (zodttd) has expressed interest in such a project, but as of now it hasn't been started.
ok....
so we all on the same page now?
-yes it will have its own commercial games, no they are not being made by nintendo/squar enix/sega
-yes it will have emulators, though unfortunately PS2 and Game cube are monsters in and of them selves and wont likely make an apperance.
-yes it will run linux and will likely have many apps ported to it
-yes multimedia is a big one, with a res of 800x480 and 2 SDHC cards (potential 64+ gigs of storage) we will have lots of movies music and tv shows.
-battery is said to last ~8 hrs on full cpu load ~500 hrs for MP3 playback (closed screen off)
-full featured WEB BROWSER!!! =D thats always nice
- touch screen now if only we can get gimp on there!
-bluetooth, 802.11 b/g, usb host! ( yay the possablities mouse/keyboard/web cam, GPS)
-did i mention the Svideo out? by the way ( in case you dont know) 800x480 work well on TVs unless your looking for HD
those of you not geeking out about this... well no ones perfect!
notes to self:
now... to find a job and buy my toys....
nobody ever said 500hours... more like 100hours for mp3 screen off
What we're seeing here isn't revolutionary, it's simply another stage of evolution in handheld technology. In terms of performance, yes it is better than the PSP and the DS (probably combined), but that doesn't mean it is the better or worse system. We'll have to wait and see when the official US price is advertised to determine how the system compares in price/performance comparison against other handhelds.
As far as those people squeeling, "Home-brew is evil! I'm not buying it unless huge corporations like Squeenix (Square-Enix for the uneducated amongst the masses), Sony, and Nintendo developed it!!!"... I have one thing to say to you - F OFF!! Sure these developers make some pretty awesome games... but they make some pretty crappy ones too. It's no different in the indie community. Home-brew games can be of excellent or ridiculously crappy quality just like the big boys make. The only ONLY difference between the two is the marketing. Indie developers usually don't have the money to advertise to as wide a market as the big boys, but in my opinion a truly great game will get noticed by those of us determined to explore and find these little treasures hidden in our little niche of the developement world.
I for one can't wait to get my hands on one of these and move my collection of emulation ROMS over so I can carry them with me everywhere I go, and I can't wait to see who has the stones to make a gem of an indie game. The challenge is out, the gauntlet has been thrown, you know what you doing! Take off every ZIG!
This might be a bit of a weird comparison, but I'm considering buying an Eee PC so I can sit outside in the garden and surf the web / read an eBook / play a ROM or other game. What do you guys think, should I go for the Eee PC, wait for the OpenPandora (and probably miss the first batch), or save up and buy both with an approximate half year gap in buying (hey, I'm not rich)?
I have an EEE 900 that dual boots Ubuntu EEE and Windows XP pro. It's a great little machine for what it is, but I would never buy one of these for gaming. The biggest problem is the input control for games. The keyboard is totally inadequate for any kind of action games. Granted, you can plug a USB controller into it, but then you lose some portability, and especially on Ubuntu, not everything supports USB input without jumping through some hoops.
I also have a GP2X F100 mark 2 with a 16GB SDHC card in it, which is awesome in it's own way. Ironically, the GP2X has a lot of the same open source games that are available on Ubuntu (and then some), but the integrated controls, size, and ruggedness of it (at least compared to the EEE) make it a much better portable gaming machine, IMO. The emulators are really good and well-developed on the GP2X but the really big thing is that gaming stuff (both emus and homebrew) you run on the EEE suffers from it's weird screen aspect ratio and resolution. You can work around it in a lot of cases, but especially on Ubuntu, a lot of the games and emulators you run will not fit on the screen very well. They are not written specifically for that hardware as they would be on a GP2X and/or Pandora. The thing is, you can't run a web browser or do much else on the GP2X online (practically speaking). The EEE is great at that.
The thing about the Pandora, if it shapes up as they say it will is that it could do all of the above really well. The input control system (with true analog control!) and overall system power sound great. I will probably get one, but I don't think I'm going to be at the front of the line to preorder it. When the GP2X came out it had a lot of little issues that they mostly fixed in the next production round (mark 2). I think I'll let the early adopters work the bugs out as they did with the GP2X and if everything looks good, buy one from the second batch.
For what it's worth, I keep hearing a lot of people saying that homebrew is mostly crap, and the only reason anyone would buy an open source gaming console is to play emulators. Maybe that's what you would do, but you don't know what your missing. There is really good original and ported software on the GP2X, and it will only be better on something like the Pandora. The crap software is labeled as such pretty quickly by the community and generally gets weeded out. I have a LOT of emulators on a lot of different systems, and even as much as I like them I find myself playing the original stuff at least as much. It's really evolved in the last couple of years.
As for lack of commercial software, if you want that, go buy a PSP or DS. We actually have 5 DSs in our house and a lot of bought cartridges, mostly because the network play is awesome. I love the cartridges that let you "download play" with 4+ systems off one cartridge. But for single system gaming, I'd put a lot of the open source games on the GP2X up against the stuff on the DS any day.
Unless you need a full general-purpose computer or need something right now, you'd probably be better off waiting until Pandora comes out before you make a decision about which machine to buy. If the only reason you would buy a EEE is to play games, I think you'd be wasting your money. By the time you got the thing set up the way you want it, you would have spent 2X as much anyway.
those of you complaining about the lack of a keyboard, it has usb support, you can pick up a usb keyboard cheap these days. Better yet buy one of those 1 in usb blue tooth dongles and a fold up blue tooth keyboard like you would for your pda, problem salved. This is a powerful piece of open hardware that will never be bricked by the manufacturer for hacking it, like your iphones and psp's
The Pandora is a monster of a device. While people are comparing pure MHz between various ARM devices, that really can't be done here. Many existing devices (Palm, Zaurus, etc.) have ARM11 or similar CPUs. The Pandora has a Cortex-A8 - a superscalar ARM CPU which is much more powerful than the simple MHz number. In terms of pure dhrystone MIPS, it gets about 2 MIPS per MHz. MUCH better than other, existing ARM devices. The most powerful console it may be able to successfully emulate (playable) is the N64. If someone writes a DC emulator, it's purely proof-of-concept and won't be playable.
In terms of input, it has full USB Host and BT, so you can hook up wired/wireless input devices and use those if you don't like the keyboard. The keyboard was put on partially for office program use, but also for old systems that used text input in the games.
Here's a last little thought - the Pandora, when overclocked to 900MHz, is capable of emulating FF7 TOTALLY IN SOFTWARE at up to 200fps. The Pandora's got a OpenGL 2.0 ES capable graphics chip (PowerVR SGX), but it was not used in the PS1 emu tests. 200fps emulation of a PSX on a handheld IN SOFTWARE. That's just ridiculous.
You guys are completely forgetting the DSP in the system. That can be used for a lot of tasks, with clever programming, other than audio. There are a lot of emulation functions you can offload from the main CPU to it to drastically improve performance. A properly done emulator utilizing the CPU, DSP, AND the GPU will be pretty damn powerful. I wouldn't be surprised to see a mostly playable DC emulator on it eventually.
Pandoara= A computer with linux os + some integrated buttons. It's NOT a game console like DS and PSP.
What games can you play on linux? Go figure. Emulator running OTHER game console's games and mini linux games.
I would rather get a one of those dell mini's for the same price. Its more powerful and its going to be easier to run games on then this would be. Plus much bigger keyboard, bigger screen, longer battery life, and tons of other stuff.
i managed to preorder one :-) i'm very looking forward for it to arrive!
I've read the first comments (like 20) and so far here's some questionning proof answers:
-As I've seen in a comment back up, Pandora is the double, or more, of the PSP; like I think the iPhone is but only double and not better
-as usual these devices only contain 32 -bit processors, so N64 is impossible
- if DS is possible, I mean, what use should have on Pandora if it hasn't touchscreen? And also, DS like it's said Dual Screen. Each screen must have a cardboard, but since Pandora only has one, so emulating it is impossible
-Pandorais the same as the the new mini ASUS but three times better. So if I have enough money, I'll spend on it gratefully because having a PC with Windows, Mac and Linux with tje capability of doing what most small PCs don't do is best for us...
Now I have one simple question:
Is this coming to Portugal?