Pandora fans are definitely
partying tonight. Michael Weston and crew have uploaded the first pics of manufacturing test unit built using the mass production parts -- as team member Craig Rothwell noted over at the
GP32X forums, even if minor tweaks are deemed necessary, for all intents and purposes this is the first production unit. There's plenty more pics in Weston's Photobucket gallery, including a veritable sea of internal boards (seen after the break). Rothwell says more pics and video are coming but gave no indication of when -- if you think you can temper your excitement, it might be best to sleep tonight and check in on things again tomorrow.
Update: Video showing first boot of this ARM Cortex-A8 gaming handheld with PowerVR SGX programmable GPU after the break!
[Thanks, xmrgamerx]
posted December 9th 2009 1:49AM
@WizardStan I'm referring to EvilDragon. If he's not the one who's posted this set of images, I goofed. He'd been doing the blogging in the past.
I'm saying they'll have problems if they don't want to use the stock firmware, more specifically if they want to use a different/newer kernel.
Judging by the comments, I doubt many people will want to use the stock firmware.
Again, search "gma 500 ubuntu" for a loooong list of people having issues with this chipset.
@(Unverified)
I'd rather have video acceleration than a simple life.
Oh man I bet I can expect mine in just another two months!
Looks great. I'm liking the chunky look : ) A finger-friendly UI frontend would be cool though. I wonder if they provide localised keyboards and not just the English one?
@KVirtanen
Just english at the moment, unfortunately.
The layout is entirely configurable in software, however, so if there are any characters you use, you can set them to whatever you want, and then put a sticker on the key if you want.
And Evil Dragon has said he intends to make at least German layouts, and other layouts are sure to follow if demand is high enough. It was just for the first batch (or so) that they needed everything to be the same for simplicity and cost.
At least "shutdown time" is quick. ;-) I'd love to develop for this thing, but they need to improve the UI (something more like notebook remix would seem appropriate) and to get boot time down below 10s (from current ~60s). It can be done: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483.
From :47 to ~1:47 to boot.
I'm not complaining, considering it's loading an entire OS on that thing... since the community (almost) has a physical system to work with, things will only improve from here.
I bet the devs who already have programs for this device are excited as well.
I sent for one myself; they might have a few from the first batch if you're lucky (some people did opt out of buying).
Oh my sweet, jolly Jesus. Is that thing running linux? BackTrack4 + ridiculously awesome homebrew gameboyesque thing (as pictured above)= somewhat large security issue for the network admin at my high school.
this looks cool