Zii Processor?????
you mean the one Creative launched a few eons ago which is everything but a processor?

I would say two things would seriously hamper Zii processor's launch.. 1) it comes from a company which has till date always underperformed despite a decently better quality of products then most competitors - because Creative has somehow always been able to screw the cashflow management of the product making the success of product a reason for its eventual failure (read inventory problems); 2) it uses a an unknown instruction code... how do you expect any developer to write on something like that? If creative wants to wait to announce what lies under its hood till a product is ready.. it will reach market with a seriously bad developer base and a downright failure......

I have nothing against Creative, infact I love their product quality.. but seriously, I think they need to be run by somebody who understands that technology alone doesn't sell.. you have to make a product people want..

Is it just me who thinks this is a no news....
Please read the original Gartner release and then this one and you will note issues neatly hidden in the second document:
1. Downgrade rights are only for Vista Ultimate and Vista Enterprise... Most retail PC's or even for that matter corporate PCs do not come with the highest priced SKUs.

2. Big corporate users always buy volume licensing because it gives them flexibility of using a single image to simply write on all PCs..

3. Even though corporates can no longer buy XP volume license (note: BUY not USE), Vista volume licenses are still available till 2011... And note... that Vista licenses are not only cheaper that Win 7 but come with downgrade rights. (although same problem as Win 7 that it is only for the highest price SKU).

4. Windows XP support ends 2014 and no company wants to be in a situation with no support. So a structured transition to Win 7 should be on cards of every company. Heck most companies will still wait for Win 7 SP1 before formally rolling it across organisation.

Going Offtrack from the accomplishement of these fellas..
Who thinks that this company will be bought by Intel and then the idea shoved up in some corner with a lame version appearing sometime later which would still push high-end gaming stations for the best latency?

ahh.. forgot to add...
ofcourse it boils down to how many years

in simple words this means that AMD has an outside chance to negate the manufacturing advantage of Intel in a few years With node gap slowly removed, the fight will be on design and consumer acceptance.. AMD with its less lofty profit targets will keep the fight alive and may possibly gain back some share provided it designs better.

I was actually unsure of the software support for the system.
Going through the detailed specs of the device, while the processor would be fairly advanced, I note that it is equivalent to what you would see in a high-end smartphone. Infact Nvidia's Tegra is in the same ballpark.

I fully agree with the authors that these devices will be good for emulation of vintage titles and can run upto quake III and maybe even Doom 3. That said, these would be open source codes reoptimised for this particular class of CPU and not native codes. My experience says, except for the enthusiast community who will port the free software engines to this machine nothing much would happen. Emulation - oh yeah definitely the target, but as the authors say dreamcast is pushing the boundries.

Higher frequencies do not mean higher performance, higher RAM may mean incremental improvements but again not mind bending performances. DS and PSP are machines targetted from day one at gaming and the companies have built around a library of games around that capability. Pandora may have the best machine but unless software companies support it, I would say it is somebody's dream gone wrong.

The other thing this machine has going wrong is the pricing. At ~US$400, it outprices itself versus PSP and DS.. and remember PSP can also homebrew vintage games (ok I agree the performance sucks, but the games are still playable). So I still do not see where it differentiates itself from the entrenched players.

Please enlighten me if you a better ides.

Cheers

Uh.. whats potent about pandora?
How does it compare versus Nintendo DS and PSP which have a solid platform and plentiful of games..

ARM cortex 8 processor... sounds ultra light on batteries but is it powerful enough to handle gaming as seen in DS and PSP.

Disclaimer: Own a PSP and have been eyeing a DS for quite sometime now.

Haven't seen the UK pricing.. that said Apple has done the best marketing of this fact yet and made money out of it...

Normally operators buy phones from operators in bulk and subsidise internally.. whereas Apple claims the price reduction including the subsidy. That is a definite 1 UP on the other operators. Moreover having just one SKU compared to multiple SKU's limits their cost exposure, benefits of economies of scale and yet position it as a differented device.. Marvellous.

I just hope it doesn't go down the 1-pony trick of Motorola.

Publics right to disclosure to judge the bias of the post :)

US$400 + US$60/mth*24months = US$1840
US$200 + US$70/mth*24months = US$1880

A user ends up paying more over the life of the 3G phone versus the original phone....
Can we please stop gushing over the US$199 price now.

Correcting the typo...