Preorders will begin September 30th, 2008
Pandora will begin shipping Nov. 13th, 2008
Perhaps a pre-preorder for GP32X people can be established on September 15th for those who know they want one and don't mind paying sooner to guarantee their system? I guess that will be up to individuals to decide; totally optional of course.
This is my closest estimate based on lead times I see today. The 13th is my birthday, but mid-November is more accurate. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Sorry, it's a big project with few people. I'm trying for October, but why kid myself? This is more realistic. The launch will happen, but it will blow every time line we have ever established. Everyone here knows this isn't being done by a huge company with a mega staff so I truly hope the core of this community understands and respects that. As Craig always says, this has to be done right the first time.
Anyone who thinks they can come along and just whip one of these devices out (like the Zephyr) is totally kidding themselves. It is a huge, huge task! I haven't seen Chad in a while but I'm sure he'll be back to rip me a new one, but what can I do? I'm just one guy and I am already on this seven days a week. My focus will remain to make solid hardware, a strong functional case and a stable kernel with support for every piece of silicon inside the Pandora. That is basically what I am attempting to wrap up over the next few weeks. I already have a nice list of things based on the last batch of prototypes. As far as any application software goes, I really don't care. That's the easy part that any code savvy person can handle and we have lots of people dying to jump in on that.
There really isn't any "secretive crap". It just seems like nothing takes the time expected. We lost an entire two months with slow assembly and broken boards. It was a freakin' nightmare but now we are moving ahead again. We have to post some estimation date on the website for people viewing the site to see that this is in development and not some far off in 2009 project and at the time of posting, it always seems logical to expect completion by that date.
