307: Pandora's Box

Amalith

New member
Mar 29, 2009
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I considered picking one of these up instead of a PSP back when it was $300. Now that it's considerably more expensive and at the same time more outdated, I guess I have to pass. I still think it's a really interesting concept though.
 

=Doc=

New member
Jan 18, 2011
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"Douglas Heaven sometimes gets to play with his wife's Pandora."

Oh ye hairy flippin' gods, what a pun.. ^^
 

Doctor Proctor

Omega-3 Man
Oct 21, 2008
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=Doc= said:
"Douglas Heaven sometimes gets to play with his wife's Pandora."

Oh ye hairy flippin' gods, what a pun.. ^^
I was wondering if someone else was gonna catch that. :) Very nice indeed...
 

=Doc=

New member
Jan 18, 2011
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Doctor Proctor said:
=Doc= said:
"Douglas Heaven sometimes gets to play with his wife's Pandora."

Oh ye hairy flippin' gods, what a pun.. ^^
I was wondering if someone else was gonna catch that. :) Very nice indeed...
Caught and mottoed! And, of course, the first two people to catch it are doctors! ^^
 

anti23

New member
May 26, 2011
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Freedom is worth 500$. There are real people behind this with an ideology for perfection and not for money!
 

viranimus

Thread killer
Nov 20, 2009
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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.
 

Fasckira

Dice Tart
Oct 22, 2009
1,678
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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

So far, 180 PCBs have been produced, 80 have been assembled, fully tested and are ready to ship. While this sounds like a lot, the theoretical output of the machine is 250 per day (8 hour shift), but mass productions should start at a slower pace to be sure evrrything works.
Only 3 of those refused to bootup at all, while about 8 have a non-working left nub, so it seems there's some part that needs an optimized placement in the machine program as well.
Getting there. Slowly. Still looks appealing but its just so expensive. :(