I Got My Pandora


Exophase said:
Found the sticky keys option in accessibility, surprised no one told me about this yet. Bug: accessibility window goes beyond screen area and can't be scrolled ;)
Excellent! I'd have never thought of that because I still remember ED saying that it wasn't a feature he'd added yet. If it works that way, I guess he won't have to (other than to fix the accessibility window, I guess)
You can drag the window around by holding shift and just click-drag anywhere in the window. Unless it's alt-click-drag.
 
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Left shoulder is also shift, which can be handy

exo- entirely possible mm forgets the ts or somehging; mostly coded in 5 nights it's rushed but solid. Added lots of bits over time, but it really does need a rewrite :) I like mm though.. Nice and to The point, but needs more keyb shortcut and workflow tweaks IMHO to feel better *shrug* let me know - I need someone to give good hard review of mm so I know what works/doesn't work in using it etc. Still, it suports preview overrides and icon overrides and Hemingway and such, so not bad hopefully :)

jeffphone
 
Hi there!

This is Thorgan's first post, hope you'll enjoy it.

I got my pandora on thurday. Ordered 30 of september, 2008 16:22 (paris time).

An now, a quick review:

About the hardware:

My pandora came without stylus (I don't care, I have a spare NDS lite one that fits perfectly in the case).

Case is made of a nice hard plastic, seems really robust (already traveled in my backpack with keys and other stuff, didn't get a scratch). The whole unit is a little bit heavy compared to ds lite.
Keyboard was pretty hard to press at first, now it's getting softer and thumb-typing is really quick and painless. The keyboard layout is natural and efficient for me. Beware of long nails: my enter key got a little scratched on the top left edge.

Nubs have a weak travel resistance compared to the psp nub (especially the right one), they feel precise and comfortable. I didn't expect the mouse control to be that efficient!

Shoulder buttons as well as the ABXY buttons were making a squeaky sound at first but once they wear a little bit it disappear.

Volume control is a little bit too much buried in the case to my taste, but it allows a really precise control.

Screen is really bright and colorful, however I already noticed a little bit of ghosting in the nes emulator, less than the first psp screen but still noticeable.

The wifi is stable when you are in the access point room (2 hours of shoutcast streaming with no problem). I tried in a room where the signal gets weaker, I've experienced frequent disconnections with erratic automatic recovering (psp and nintendo ds don't disconnect at all), I guess it's mainly a software problem.

Overclocking goes to 850mhz with no problem.

Battery lasted more than 8 hours with wifi and me messing around :).

About the default software :

- cold boot is fast, with no graphical glitches, very clean. Wifi autoconnection is fast.
- xfce works well but feels like not 2d accelerated (if you tried yellowdog linux on ps3 you know what I mean), I noticed some audio skipping in gnome mplayer when opening a new program or moving a window around.
- pidgin crashes often when typing text. I advice changing the default setting of pidgin to disable logging, it helps a little bit (and preserve your nand).
- the default web browser crashes a lot when using the "back" button. Downloading a file (pnd for example) to sd card freezes the browser until it completes! Chromium would be a better choice (faster and perfectly stable) if it had HTTPS.
- wifi reconnection is broken, I have to toggle wifi off/on to get the connection back.
- auto mounting of sd cards seems reliable, however, pnds are sometimes not shown when reinserting the sd card, a reboot fixes it.
- copying from a (fast) usb thumbdrive to (fast) sd card is really slow: more than 1 hour for 600MB (I'm almost sure it's a kernel/mounting problem)
- suspend mode has a little bug: if you suspend the device, close the screen, open it again, the screen will turn on but you'll have to press again the suspend slider to get the cpu speed/wifi back.
- general SD performance can be improved
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX?)
- switching from XFCE to minimenu saves xfce session (programs launched), which mean at next reboot or when you get back to xfce, every active program you had in xfce will start again, and again until you wipe the session.

About homebrews and emulators:

- n64 is amazing, period (don't forget to choose the rom using touchscreen)
- pandorapanic is really nice and polished.
- quake3 looks promising
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX?)
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX?)
(- HOW DO YOU TYPE C: in DOSBOX? :( )
- pnd concept is really convenient


Conclusion:

This is the most amazing piece of hardware of my personal collection :). I give it a perfect 10/10!
Now I only have to set up a nice dev environment...

Amazing job Openpandora team!

Cheers!
 
My Pandora arrived at my office this morning, and it's freaking awesome! I had worried that it would be an anticlimax after waiting so long, but now I have it in my hands (typing this) I am very pleased!

Unfortunately I'm going to Glastonbury tomorrow, so I haven't got much time to play with it (I'm tempted to bring it along, but that's probably a bad idea!), and I'm stuck at work at the moment without access to my ROM collection, but my first impressions are very good.

The keyboard is much better to type on than a Blackberry, and the spell checker works in Chromium, so it's much better than any other mobile device I tried for posting on forums!

Pandora Panic is also much better than I was expecting (sorry to have doubted you guys!).

It is distracting me from all the work I'm supposed to be doing at the moment though, I hope I'll have time for a Street Fighter marathon when I get home tonight!
 
Posting from my Pandora to see how well I can type on it.

First impressions: it's heavier than I imagined it would be, but not to the point of bothering me. I like the finish; I read someone saying that it attracted prints but mine definitely doesn't. If it were a glossy finish it'd be full by now. Sturdy construction. Nubs are great when correctly calibrated, okay when not. Shoulder buttons are a bit tight but I assume they will loosen up with time.

I have that screen bevel bow but it's slight and I doubt I would have noticed had I not known to look for it. The stylus is lodged in tight. Maybe too tight. Tip was a bit rough, I think it was sanded already but I did some myself.

Software: pleasantly surprised! Midori crashes constantly but Arora works. Getting on wifi was pain free. Also my SD cards have not arrived yet so I am running off my 16gb pro duo stick trough USB. Takes a few seconds to detect but it loads PNDs from it as normal! Very nice. The USB stick drains the battery but it it showing 8 hours left.

Controls: touch screen works but it's a bit stiff. There's a noticable delay. Dpad and buttons feel very nice. This post has so far taken 20 minutes to type, but I think that's pretty good since I'm not used to it yet. It's decently comfortable to type on which is saying a lot considering I have very long nails (0.5cm long) though I lament the lack of a right shift when I need to cap letters on the left. The keys are very shiny and sometimes the blue Fn print is hard to see through the glare.

26 minutes now. Going to leave it here and maybe post more later. I love my Pandora!
 
You've had your Pandora for 26 minutes and your MMO isn't done yet? I am sorely disappointed. :p
 
Are there any good threads/pages with beginners tips?

I found the tip for moving windows offscreen (hold shift and then use stylus to drag from anywhere) so I could set up the network. Then I was next scuppered by Midori not working on appstore - doh! So I've downloaded the firefox pnd on the PC and copied it to the SD. It doesn't seem to do anything and clicking on it doesn't do anything... I thought these things were magically scanned for?

Before the 'search nazis' get me, I will. I'm just bouncing because I finally got this and want to play/try some stuff!

Edit: The FAQ lies 'Any PND files on either of the SD cards will be automatically detected and shown in the menu.'... Run PND does nothing. What's the trick? Me wanna play some stuff!

Edit2: Create a folder on the SD card called pandora and in that create another folder either called desktop or menu. Then put the PND in that! Obvious when you've found the answer:) Next step - how does control work? Ctrl C in terminal does not work...

Edit3: Putting it into pandora/menu/firefox.pnd didn't work. What's the next thing to try?

Edit4: Found it - just being blind, ignore Edit3! Under Network/Firefox Webbrowser. I was looking for something shorter...

Edit5: Why does pndnotifyd take so much CPU?

Edit6: I like what hotfix 2 is installing. Though I wonder if its already installed since this was built well after that was released...

Edit7: Right, got some emulators on. Looks like they prompt with a dialog for ROMs so they can be put anywhere. Here goes...

Edit8: Eeek, horrible crackly sound - now where is that fix I saw on the forum the other day...

Edit9: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/53974-bad-sound-quality/page__st__150__p__876296&#entry876296. Now if only I could figure out how to quit picodrive! I pressed every button!

Edit10: Still can't stop this - I'm guessing picodrive beta does not have a menu to select another rom or quit. Since I haven't set up sshd yet have to switch off the pandora I guess...

Edit11: Well Snes and Picodrive are cool. Still can't change ROM in Picodrive. Think its "Select" to do so and my button is broken:-( I tried to reconfigure it to another button but can't see how to confirm the changes. Esc quits the control configuration menu. Can't find which key to confirm them though! Also tried Quake3. Runs pretty smoothly mostly. Though the nubs frequently seem to get confused and refuse to let me move at all. Also they seem to be so ultra-sensitive I can't control it... Anyway very cool to have this on a handheld - remember it struggling horribly back in the day on my Voodoo Banshee!

Edit12: Anyone done a build of Atari800?

Edit13: Well its going back for a working keymat to fix ctrl/select. Will do update 14 through 512 shortly!
 
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^ http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/forum/83-i-need-help-pandora/ ;)
 
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Pndnotifyd should take very little CPU - when you insert/eject sd it'll chug for a second, but oherwise it barely does anything

I'll have to profile it again, been awhile

jeffphone
 
skeezix said:
Pndnotifyd should take very little CPU - when you insert/eject sd it'll chug for a second, but oherwise it barely does anything
It kept popping up on top (10-30%), several minutes after inserting an sd card. Thought it might be an expensive periodic poll. I checked this before installing the hotfix.
 
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My guess would be a deluge of dbus events being grepped. It needs a whole new nonsuck dubs client routine put in :)

Jeffphone
 
Ok. Had it for a day, here's my first thoughts:

Build quality - very good indeed. I have the screen bevel thing that's been talked about but I seriously doubt I'd have noticed it if it hadn't been mentioned. It's quite weighty for its size and the finish is really nice. Stylus goes in with a satisfying click. Only thing that's annoyed me is the battery cover sticker. It's peeling off and leaves a bit sort of doubled back on itself a couple of millimetres wide. Sounds innocuous but it means closing the battery lid can be a bit fiddly as it gets in the way. I'd peel it off the battery but for some reason I don't want to :)

Screen - crystal clear. I've noticed some ghosting on a couple of games (Sensi Soccer for one) but nothing that serious.

Dpad and buttons - excellent. Best Dpad I've ever used! Well done DaveC! ABXY buttons are fine. Shoulder buttons are fine.

Keyboard - mines is a bit stiff but I assume this will wear in with use. Layout takes a bit of getting used to but not an issue.

Nubs - very sensitive but usable in place of the stylus once you get used to. My right nub acts up sometimes but rotating it and pushing it up/down/left/right and releasing it sorts it out. Played a bit of F-Zero X on the N64 and it was ok once you got used to the sensitivity. I think there is a way to make them less sensitive - not looked into that yet.

Default software - basic but that's how I'd want it - I like to pick my own software :D

Wifi - slow. Not to the point of unusable but slow. Not speed tested it yet. Feels around the 80-100kb mark.

Speakers - not bad at all! For such small speakers they are clear and usable for listening to MP3s in the background.

I'm totally addicted to UAE4ALL. Spent last night playing Speedball2, Sensi Soccer, Supercars2, Turrican2 and Stunt Car Racer. Full speed for all, as far as I can tell, with a little stuttering sound at some places in some games.

Overall I'm really pleased with my Pandora. So glad I pre-ordered early.
Congrats to the OP team - lovely piece of kit :D And the potential of this thing is immense.

And now to coding....
 
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