Pandora 2011-2013 memories


I'm still waiting for your article Trashy btw :) hehe
^ Well we went there to sell some Pandori, answered a lot of questions and displayed a lot of the features of the Pandora, Got into friendly debates with the GCW Zero guys, Drank some good beer, ate some good food and outside of that I guess there was a game convention I didn't see much of outside of the booth we were in.


I have a hard time writing articles myself I go off into tangents and such, perhaps if I had questions in an interview format you could get more out of me.
 
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+Good Both coding compo's lots of major ports, homebrew, apps and improvements were created for the compo.
 
I just took an adventure back in time on engadget posts about the pandora, esp the comments, you can watch the general attitude change towards this thing. If you filter through the fanboy/supporter and troll/hater posts that is.

what a sad sad trip the last 6 years have been... it's a good story though.
 
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(from the view of someone who first heard about the Pandora ~5 years ago, lost sight of it for years, got reminded just a few months back and jumped on board)

It's really been a long time.. I just skipped through all the newsletters I received from ED since I ordered the GP2X ~6 years ago..
 

  • July 7th, 2010: "Pandora - Batch 2 Preorder via Mail -- The Pandora is alive!"
  • September 7th, 2011: "5. Pandora: Wanted but hard-to-get. This will hopefully change in the future."
  • January 23rd, 2013: "Pandora - still going on. It would've been great if the production company in Texas that was supposed to produce the PCBs didn't have that many issues. Over 1000 boards they produced are not working, which caused a HUGE loss."
  • August 19th, 2013: "Pandora 1GHz -- Wir warten momentan noch auf eine Neulieferung - die hoffentlich in den nächsten zwei Wochen endlich eintrudelt." (waiting for new shipment which is expected to arrive within the next two weeks)
Called ED after the last newsletter and ordered this miraculous Pandora shortly after :)


Why? Well, for one thing it's because I think that this whole upgrading-your-HW-like-changing-socks craze nowadays is kind of stupid and the potential of the Pandora HW is far from having been fully exploited, IMHO.

I grew up in an era when it was far from unusal that SW devs needed 5-10 years to fully grasp a new HW/platform. In some cases that even took up to 20+ years.

Sure, you can bring almost every platform to its knees by brute force, or, god beware, poorly optimized code.

This includes ports of applications written for completely different (higher spec'd) systems, or our beloved emulators.
(don't get me wrong -- the Pandora has some pretty good emulators but these things always need at least 5..10 times more HW resources than the platform they are trying to emulate)

What we need is more _native_ applications, IMHO.


Anyways, the other, and maybe even more interesting aspect about the Pandora, IMHO, is that it was designed by "geeks", for "geeks".

By this I mean that   a ) it grants you practically unlimited freedom to modify its software and   b ) there's no secondary, remote-controllable 'supervisor' OS lurking in the background (like on many/most/ALL?? mobile phones nowadays).

Its main OS also does not call back home every chance it gets to report the user's activities or even forces them to upload all their data to remote "cloud" servers instead of keeping them on local storage (e.g. SDCards).

To me this feels like one of the last true homecomputers.
 
The pandora has seen it's fair share of hardware upgrades in it's lifetime too, but is somewhat unique with their own trade in your old for a new one upgrade policy. But even some cell carriers are starting to do the same type of system. I got $200 trade in credit on my last upgrade from Sprint in the states which basically covered my subsidized upgrade cost.

I can feel ya on the discovering hardware potential thing, but IMO ARM is here to stay for mobile devices. It seems the battle has been long won many times over compared to other architectures. (x86 still seems to be the last man standing though) and unlike consoles of yesteryear with their own basically specialized embeded system knowledge learned isn't nessisairly lost with hardware upgrades as long as it stays ARM. So the outdated specs thing doesn't hold a whole lot of ground. I am certain lessons learned here could be easily adapted to a new updated ARM based system, unlike learning how to program for a SNES for example.

What I don't understand is the native apps thing, do you mean software written with ARM in mind or what? There doesn't appear to be much of any wrapped software anymore on the pandora, or very little in use without an alternative. I would say by non emulated code that the vast majority of pandora's apps are native. If you want to be extremely strict about it and use ARM specific assembly Drastic and PCSX are the only 2 major programs that come to mind (I'm sorry if I'm totally off) but those appear to be some of the most prominent "native" apps if you want to call them that. And PCSX might not totally count because it is a port from PC (even if completely redesigned)

you seem have a misconception (that I've heard a lot around here though) with what I'm assuming android and iOS. I am fairly certain that since you get targeted adds with iOS, that you're being "unknownly" recorded so I'll give you that one but it's also closed source so not worth comparing. But open source android (the same that's optionally on the pandora) has a opt-in during initial setup. If you don't include proprietary closed apps or choose to release your statistics, they don't get released. Carrier branded and google experience devices do this without your permission though. So compared to other devices yes, compared to other open source mobile OS's no. The two can only be compared in functionality, not it's ability to hold your private information private because they are identical in that respect. I only run the said version of android on my phones partially for that exact reason.

I do agree with you on the by geeks for geeks thing, if any device screams geek as much if not more than a scientific calculator it's the pandora. Even in the age of my grandmother having a mobile device, it still turns heads in a not so flattering way sometimes.
 
- DosBox getting better, better and better! (things like BlakeStone: fullscreen + fluent at 600 MHz)

- The wonderful "Ex Plus Alpha" emulators : the trend of emulators being of one "family" having very similar interfaces :)

- Compo4all.
 
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My Display Backlight Controll fall out

And magically it fixed it self the last week i ditnt touchd the pandora..

Its a mirrackle (someone shall play Queen)..

So this happens 2013..

And therefore, its the best Homebrewhandheld/Mini Linux PC on this World Disk..
 
All Belgians I ever met spoke at least 3 languages fluent, that's kind of frustrating. -.-
 
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Homebrew software coded on the Pandora itself, for example my stuff:

- Pandora System Info

- Pandora Image Viewer

- Pandora Microbes

- Pandora NubNub

I guess most other devs prefer cross-compiling or at least ssh into their Pandora so they have a big screen and big keyboard, but I prefer coding&compiling on the Pandora itself, on the train or while taking a bath.
 
Homebrew software coded on the Pandora itself, for example my stuff:

- Pandora System Info

- Pandora Image Viewer

- Pandora Microbes

- Pandora NubNub

I guess most other devs prefer cross-compiling or at least ssh into their Pandora so they have a big screen and big keyboard, but I prefer coding&compiling on the Pandora itself, on the train or while taking a bath.
My bath only takes five minutes, and 4 of those minutes I'm all soaped up so wouldn't get done much with Pandora in there :)
 
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I like to take two-hour baths (with regular extra hot water additions). Three hours has happened - but only since I got my Pandora ;)

I just hope I never accidentally drop it :/
 
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