Pandora’s Box Opens Soon…
January 12, 2009
And that’s not such a bad thing. The Pandora (official site – Written about previously here) is an open source gaming beast. The ship date has been moved back several times, most recently because LCD’s have taken too long to be produced and bank problems with the orders. Things are slowly coming together.
As the dev team works hard. the release date nears as software is produced and perfected. The dev team is an individual team of normal guys, with an exceptional intelligence. They all have experience with things, but nothing with this magnitude. The original plan was to produce 3000, although this was upped to 4000, and you could only get one by preorder. They expect to have 200-300 extra so you MIGHT be able to snag one without a preorder.
Selling 2000 Pandora’s in the first 6 hours, so much traffic on the sites that were selling them they were slowing due to load. Second batch of Pandora’s is expected to be run in 2009, although they have yet to get the first batch shipped. When the Pandora finally gets here we will have a special hands on review, so check back often. This will not happen until the device gets here, but in the mean time feel free to watch the attached video demonstrating Pandora’s custom OS.
The tale of this machine is a long one, first the preorder date got moved back a few times, the preorders finally opened. August 14th, 2008 the “final” design had its pictures posted here. On October 30th the developers decided, due to the bank problems they would make it up to us, and with the decrease in the price of the RAM and NAND, they decided to double both. Now it has 256 MB of RAM and 512 MB of NAND — DOUBLE that of the previous design. for comparison the PSP-1000 had 32 MB main memory, and the PSP-3000 with 64 MB still gets no where near the 256 MB found in the Pandora, that’s four times as much as the PSP-3000, and not only does that beat the PSP with RAM, but it has dedicated 3D hardware.
The people who need their litle gadgets, internet over your phone – even a USB mouse – it is only limited by the Linux driver availability for the device, which is actually very good despite what everyone thinks. An abundance of storage, 64 GB max, because of the dual SDHC card slots. That would be basically two 32 GB SSD’s. Although depending on how strictly it adheres to the SDHC specifications, in time it could support up to 2048 GB on each card. ( source ) 2 TB in a card. Two cards means an abundance of storage, in the future of course. And don’t forget the good thing about open source, you can change it. If the Pandora comes with explicit support for the SDHC standard, someone is bound to change that.
More will be written about this when more news surfaces.
Mean while check out this video (youtube, H.264 and XviD) demonstrating Pandora’s OS
Recently they posted the expected shipping dates and such, these now seem much more reasonable. (Which is unlike the first – which was very hopeful. Although the most recent before this one seemed doable, but then some stuff happened. We’ll see how it goes.) So here is their plan:
- Case Design: January 15th
- Case Prototyping: approx. 1-2 weeks later
- Final production and delivery: approx. 2 – 4 weeks later
That places it late February. You can expect more from us, and hopefully more from the dev team.
I can’t wait to open my box, and write a review. It will be a great upgrade to my gp2x F-200, which broke so i had to take out the touch screen and take out many pieces of the case. Let alone the specs! In case you don’t want to find them for yourself, here they are:
- ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
- 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
- PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
- 800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
- Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
- Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
- Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
- 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
- Around 10+ Hours battery life
I could not go on to mention the people behind this wondrous beast, and not feel bad about it. So major thanks to the following for all your hard work, and dedication to the community around this project.
Dev team, in no specific order:
- Craigix
- EvilDragon
- mfk
- MWeston
January 12th, 2009 | iRRVi | 
