307: Pandora's Box
- Thread starter Douglas Heaven
- Start date
Its really a shame too. I had intentions on picking this up when it was still being touted as 350$, but since theyve stated 500$ its a deal breaker.
As others have said, you can get a decent laptop/netbook for 500$ and for less than 50$ you can get a wired 360 gamepad for the controls.
The problem here is that the development hell really took its toll on the specs of the machine. Nowadays smartphones are just as powerful if not more so, and typically cost the same or less.
Also its a matter of too much or too little. In some cases yes the processing power is behind the curve of smartphones. However you have to think about practical application and know that most software your going to run on it will not utilize that much system spec. Realistically the hardest thing on it would be trying to run full on flash/html5 for videos like hulu or youtube. On that end its not enough horsepower. However on the gaming end (which thats what this thing is at its core considering the gaming controls) its more than ample to handle N64/PSX era 3D and perhaps slightly better dependent on how well the home brew application is optimized.
It is truly sad because this machine had such potential but it is now basically squandered. 500$ is too high of a price tag compared to equivalently priced smart phones that can do the same sort of things better, And for the true home brew/open source crowd I think Gamepark Holdings (the company who "sucked" to the point to inspire the birth of the pandora)has still managed to beat Pandora with offerings such as the Caanoo which is only 150$ and can do roughly about 85-90% of the same things that the Pandora offers.
Such squandered potential.
As others have said, you can get a decent laptop/netbook for 500$ and for less than 50$ you can get a wired 360 gamepad for the controls.
The problem here is that the development hell really took its toll on the specs of the machine. Nowadays smartphones are just as powerful if not more so, and typically cost the same or less.
Also its a matter of too much or too little. In some cases yes the processing power is behind the curve of smartphones. However you have to think about practical application and know that most software your going to run on it will not utilize that much system spec. Realistically the hardest thing on it would be trying to run full on flash/html5 for videos like hulu or youtube. On that end its not enough horsepower. However on the gaming end (which thats what this thing is at its core considering the gaming controls) its more than ample to handle N64/PSX era 3D and perhaps slightly better dependent on how well the home brew application is optimized.
It is truly sad because this machine had such potential but it is now basically squandered. 500$ is too high of a price tag compared to equivalently priced smart phones that can do the same sort of things better, And for the true home brew/open source crowd I think Gamepark Holdings (the company who "sucked" to the point to inspire the birth of the pandora)has still managed to beat Pandora with offerings such as the Caanoo which is only 150$ and can do roughly about 85-90% of the same things that the Pandora offers.
Such squandered potential.
Finally seems to be going into production, going by a forum post on the site:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/7312-there-we-go-2012-02-28/page__view__findpost__p__128947
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/7312-there-we-go-2012-02-28/page__view__findpost__p__128947
Getting there. Slowly. Still looks appealing but its just so expensive.