Complete, nearly finalized Pandora gets shown off on video
By Donald Melanson 
posted March 23rd 2009 11:34PM
posted March 23rd 2009 11:34PM
Poor Pandora. It looks like the shock of actually being nearly finished has turned it stark white. The little trooper was still able to make it through its latest demo video though, and it looks to be running better than ever, with it sailing through Quake at the handheld's native 800 x 480 resolution and at a full 60 fps. Just as importantly, the d-pad, nubs, action buttons, and keypad are all now apparently in their final or nearly final states and seemingly up to their all-purpose tasks, as are the all-important blinkin' LED lights. Head on past the break for the full show, and keep your eye out for a promised follow-up video (including some Quake 3 action).
They were running Quake 1, not Quake 3.
Once again: Read the article closely, it says Quake 3 will be in the NEXT video.
"and keep your eye out for a promised follow-up video (including some Quake 3 action). "
Not in this vid, in the next to be released vid.
Are there any index finger controls? I would like to see somebody actually be able to play quake in a pratical manner on one of these things.
A practical manner to most, would be real gaming controls... which is the whole point of Pandora. You could even use a mouse + WASD if you wanted to. I was tempted to say that if you want to play Quake with hobbled touchscreen controls, play it on the iPhone. But in reality, someone in the GP32X scene will probably implement this for Pandora at some stage anyway. :-)
I wouldnt say its practical to attach a mouse to the pandora unit. and where did the playing with touch screen controls come in???? i was refering to practical controls for a unit such as this would be to have index finger controls like the psp and the 2 analog controls such as a the pandora. I think you have iphone on the brain chap.
By index finger controls you mean action buttons? It has 2 of those at the back of the unit. Easy to reach with your index fingers.
My mistake Tony, when you said index finger I pictured a finger on a screen. Sounds like the buttons you're referring to are shoulder buttons. ;-) And yes, Pandora has them.
IAM SO GETTING ONE!
The reason why the case in this video is white is because they wanted a white case for the final case prototype so it would be easier to see flaws and the like during stress testing. The final case will still be black, and so you won't see all of those lights and whatnot shining through while you're playing.
They would have been better off getting a cast urethane prototype enclosure instead of that gawd awful looking SLA.
It's not SLA, it's CNC. The CNC case was made by the same factory that is manufacturing the injection-molded production cases. This way we know that the production cases will be EXACTLY like the prototypes and there won't be any surprises.
There's a lot that can happen between making a CNC'd plastic positive and actually cutting metal. There's flow issues, knit lines, mold temps, expansion, contraction, etc. etc. I'm not sure any type of prototyping can predict all the maybe's in injection molding.
All 3 quakes are running on the pandora. This quake engine is actually tyr-quake, and its actually using a wrapper for parts of opengl, it could run faster if it was converted to use opengles only.
You can see more here on my dev board: http://www.youtube.com/user/Pickle136
I have now decided I really want one of these.
I would actually love to play quake on a handheld, and iphone quake is terrible.
aww I thought this was AVATAR related, oh well
cool though
Didn't see it mentioned anywhere so I'll add that the reason the case is a somewhat translucent white is because that just the prototype CNC case. The actual case will be opaque black.
omgz diz hting is tarible!!! hwo wud uo kno tht wud buy 1 of dis? its liek not even a spowerfull as a ds maebe a psp but i dont rly think so.
lol troll is lol troll
this looks like the perfect thing for a recession antidote
Man, forget a netbook, wait a few more months & get this bad boy for about the same price & have the ability to up the memory space.
Why do gadgets that do everything always look ugly? Is it to difficult to to manufacture perfection?
Fugly. That's all I can say. I won't touch that thing with a ten foot pole. On top of that, it's ridiculous how long it takes them to stuff a relatively simple TI OMAP based design with LCD into a case. The software is going to be great, too. Oh, and it is actually quite expensive. Yeah, this is going to be the next big thing. Definitely. Rrrright.
I think i might go out and buy some hens teeth, and 3 bags of rocking horse shit.
I might be able 100% to get the above items than a pandora.
Has anyone considered plugging a bar code wand into this, adding one SDHC containing an ap and a database and thereby creating a nice tool for the guy on the forklift?
Wouldn't it be possible to make this read the diagnostic codes from whatever automobile Joe Mechanic is trying to repair at the moment?
Sure, the games are great... but if you call the thing Pandora you got to open the box.