Pandora rolls into production this month, emulates Dreamcast now
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted October 2nd 2009 1:57PM
posted October 2nd 2009 1:57PM
The OpenPandora kids have dropped us a line to say that yes, finally, "after a lot of serious tweaking," it looks like Pandora is ready to roll. And as an added bonus, they've given us a little demonstration of the open source game platform rocking a Dreamcast emulator. Not that you'll be able to play The House of The Dead 2 flawlessly on the thing -- apparently the CPU suffers from some sort of floating point unit problem and a great many texture / blending modes are not supported. So don't abandon that Dreamcast Tablet just yet. As far as getting your hands on the handheld yourself, here's the skinny: of the four thousand devices in the initial lot, there are about a hundred units unspoken for and still available for pre-order. Priced at $330 each, if you're interested you'd better jump now -- there won't be another batch until 2010. In the meantime, you can see that Dreamcast emulator we told you about in action after the break.
[Thanks, Devon]
[Thanks, Devon]
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sweet, i used to live in 'yokosuka.'
^^
I'd like to see them hurry up and complete this project.
Perhaps then they can actually produce the iControlpad. I'm convinced that it has become vaporware at this point.
When Apple opened up and released APIs for their dock connector, I thought that would speed up the project, but they haven't even updated the iControlpad website. :(
Pandora seems to have the best or only suitable controller system for a hand held, but as far as power goes the zune games using the nvidia tegra chip could be able to excreete brown waste all over the psp and pandora.
Missed deadlines, not disclosing their credit card processing error, it wasn't bank fault but theirs. I wasn't willing to wait for more delays (last xmas like they claimed), thus I ended up loosing $60 on the refund due to exchange rates.
They accepted reorders at the exact value you were refunded at. The loss was your choice so don't bitch.
Well if they held up their end of the stick there be no loss on my end would they? Now look 1 year later still haven't shipped them... btw electronics devalue quickly overtime as other competitor products improve, thus imagine if this took 2-3 years to ship, now your $300 toy is likely worth $150 now by the time you receive it (compared to other competitor products.)
Curious who's at fault here? The customer who paid in full and was told it would be shipped by Christmas last year, or OpenPandora who didn't calculate lead times properly (by a huge margin,) and should have never taken Credit Card orders in the first place. i.e. CC companies have rules for companies ship their products in under a few months 1-2 after the order was placed, thus why Credit Card processing was frozen by the bank. Also at the time OpenPandora was blaming the bank the whole time when in reality it was OpenPandora who was violating the CC shipping 1-2 month rule. In the end customers held up their bargain.... I'll let you figure out the rest.
BTW the hardware and software devs deserve lots of credit for their good work, but management really messed up here.
According to their word, OpenPandora will still allow you to purchase a Pandora at the exact price that you were refunded at any time in the future. Of course, you'll have to wait until one is available.
@Orad
Not everyone was willing to pay through some unprotected method such as a cash transfer. As you can see with the still undermined amount of time that has and will have passed by the time these things actually make into consumer's hands, those concerns were not unfounded. Given the game show style, "Do you want to lose $60-$90 or would you like to risk it all ($350+)" on a product and company which both won't truely don't exist until they build and ship their consoles, it's hard to blame melovescotch or anyone else for backing out of that deal. Even as close as they make it appear that they are this month, there still are hurdles to jump and more things that could go wrong. Luckily, nothing has gone so terribly wrong that the project and company has folded but they're not all the way there yet so anything can still happen.