Realistic Arrival Time


Cracker Jacker said:
No hardware takes 5 years to develop anymore. I would be totally shocked if any modern gadget(save the Pandora) took longer than a year from the RFC meeting to the shelves. Operating systems on the other hand are another matter entirely. To bad the Pandora team can't claim that as the hold up. If they could, maybe they wouldn't be such troll bait. Seriously, what a debacle.

Xbox 360 and PS3 took 3 years from concept to Release.

PSP took 2-3 years from concept to release.

Nintendo DS took 1 year from Announcement to release, but no-one has said when the concept was.
 
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Dear santa Lucky Charms guy Easter Bunny,

How is the north poll ireland rabbit hole? All I want for christmas St patricks day Easter is my Pandora. I don't care about the dpad revision keyboard revsion case molding revision Silk screen revision stupid chinese assholes, I just want my handheld... pretty please? I've been a very good boy this whole entire year 2 years. I'll even leave out milk and cookies Guiness Carrots for you and your reindeer whatever leprechauns ride easter bunny jetpack.

Love,
-Grant
 
wipeout2000 said:
So I have a trip in July and I was thinking of ordering a Pandora. What is the latest that I could order to potentially receive it before my mid-July trip? Thanks.
If everything goes as planned, units should start to ship within a few weeks, but being at the end of the line, your date would be cutting it close. They should have all the cases by then, but it is not known right now how much more the board production can be stepped up. So all the boards may be there before that point, ot maybe after.

Now, let's get back to the norm, and that is that final assembly won't even start for another month or so, due to some unforseen problem that has yet to pop up. So by mid july, the very front of the line might just start shipping, so who can say anything for sure. The best thing to do right now is wait until the first of april, and see where everything stands, and then we all may be able to make a more informed decision/guess.

Chris
 
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Game_over said:
The average handheld from concept to mass market is 5 years on a truly professional scale (according to some planners I've spoken to). It's amazing we've got this far (the only true bottleneck is the man power--but when you look at the man:system ratio, it's not that far off).
The difference between what you are talking about and the Pandora is how much of the device was only concept before making it. The main board in the Pandora is already premade but was heavily modified. Keymat was an awesome but simple idea. Screens already developed. Operating system once again is premade but heavily modified. The case design on the Pandora is similar to the DS so not 100% unique there either. Basically is what I am trying to say is, if the Pandora (exactly as it is now) was developed and manufactured by a big company it would have came out long ago, but I don't think that company would pour their hearts into it to make sure the OS was ready with all the cool features OP is adding.

To give you an example the PSP probably took a while cause they made their own OS, designed their case from scratch, and the UMD probably took some time to develop into a working unit. SO I wouldn't doubt the PSP taking 2-3 years to develop and test before release.
 
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Derek said:
Game_over said:
The average handheld from concept to mass market is 5 years on a truly professional scale (according to some planners I've spoken to). It's amazing we've got this far (the only true bottleneck is the man power--but when you look at the man:system ratio, it's not that far off).
The difference between what you are talking about and the Pandora is how much of the device was only concept before making it. The main board in the Pandora is already premade but was heavily modified. Keymat was an awesome but simple idea. Screens already developed. Operating system once again is premade but heavily modified. The case design on the Pandora is similar to the DS so not 100% unique there either. Basically is what I am trying to say is, if the Pandora (exactly as it is now) was developed and manufactured by a big company it would have came out long ago, but I don't think that company would pour their hearts into it to make sure the OS was ready with all the cool features OP is adding.

To give you an example the PSP probably took a while cause they made their own OS, designed their case from scratch, and the UMD probably took some time to develop into a working unit. SO I wouldn't doubt the PSP taking 2-3 years to develop and test before release.

Dude, what are you smoking? The board wasn't modified from a premade one (if you're talking about it being a modification of the BeagleBoard, MWeston's going to come in here and flame the fuck out of you). He designed the whole thing himself, which takes a LOT of time (especially seeing as it is a 6-8 layer PCB). The case, even though it is similar to a DS case, must have taken DaveC a long time to design. OH MY, THEY'RE BOTH CLAMSHELLS! Doesn't matter. Unless you've done this shit before, don't make assumptions as to how long it takes.

P.S.: By your logic, you can just say that developing the UMD drive couldn't have taken that long, as it's more or less a hybrid of a CD and a floppy disk MiniDisc.
 
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confirmed: this is now the new guessing game thread.

My guess: April 19th
 
MonkeyChops said:
confirmed: this is now the new guessing game thread.

My guess: April 19th
April 19th for your own pre-order?

You cant make a guess when you get your pandora if you dont know where you are in the que now...

im at about 3000 so i guess i will receive mine at about April the 25th or so.
 
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Vorporeal said:
Dude, what are you smoking? The board wasn't modified from a premade one (if you're talking about it being a modification of the BeagleBoard, MWeston's going to come in here and flame the fuck out of you). He designed the whole thing himself, which takes a LOT of time (especially seeing as it is a 6-8 layer PCB). The case, even though it is similar to a DS case, must have taken DaveC a long time to design. OH MY, THEY'RE BOTH CLAMSHELLS! Doesn't matter. Unless you've done this shit before, don't make assumptions as to how long it takes.

P.S.: By your logic, you can just say that developing the UMD drive couldn't have taken that long, as it's more or less a hybrid of a CD and a floppy disk MiniDisc.
But in saying all that MWeston did a fantastic/amazing job and actually developed the board pretty quickly. So in that regards, it's not what held up the Pandora.

In fact for almost a year, it's been pretty much all case related ! (As far as I can remember, and even then it could have been longer than that)

Also, if how long it takes to arrive/develop is in relation to when it was suppose to arrive. In this regard, it has taken a very long time. Something for OPT to learn from though :D
 
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If the project is on track for the current deadline, should there not have been some news about the cases/boards etc being shipped already? In order for anything to get from China/USA to the UK it would need to leave today, or tomorrow at the very latest.

Is the lack of updates indicative of the fact that things have slipped again?
 
neogramps said:
If the project is on track for the current deadline, should there not have been some news about the cases/boards etc being shipped already? In order for anything to get from China/USA to the UK it would need to leave today, or tomorrow at the very latest.

Is the lack of updates indicative of the fact that things have slipped again?
No, it's because they're busy working on the OS.

EvilDragon said:
Yeah, we're all pretty busy with this :)
We're narrowing the issue more and more... can't tell how fast we'll get it fully working, could be today, could be tomorrow, could be in a month... but basically the whole team is working for nearly 24/7 on this... we're trying the best we can.

Please don't ask me for case / board / etc. updates, as I'm also fully concentrating on WiFi right now (tweaking, testing, etc.) so I didn't have time to follow the case production process recently... Fatih will take good care of that, I'm sure :)

Okay, back to WiFi :)

Also, according to the current timeline, the cases should have been produced by Monday or so and then packaged and shipped today - so if it's taken them any longer, we probably wouldn't hear about it until tomorrow at the earliest, even if the factory was providing the team with rigorous daily updates. Which they probably aren't.
 
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Vorporeal said:
P.S.: By your logic, you can just say that developing the UMD drive couldn't have taken that long, as it's more or less a hybrid of a CD and a floppy disk MiniDisc.

Having has both Minidisc (not Hi-MD however) and a PSP, I think it would be safer to say UMD was more along the concept of a DVD/Minidisc hybrid. Much the same in disc size etc. The original Minidisc held approx 160MB of audio data and Hi-MD 1GB, allowing original discs to be reformatted to hold approx 340MB of data so obviously there was a compression scheme used to obtain higher data storage. So for UMD to hold 1.8GB of data they obviously used smaller pits and lands like DVD does in comparison to CD while maintaining the relative disc size and looks.

I know your point was to show how off the other posters logic was, but actually this should further show that making yet a smaller DVD type disc would be even more difficult at the time.

I actually loved my Minidisc recorder back in the day. If prices of hardware would only have dropped they might have replaced the Cassette sooner and spread more effectively. The transition to a device that could also play Mp3's was also too little too late when they could at one point have dominated that area in storage capacity/cost. Sony, always innovating. Always finding a way to sabotage their own idea's.

Sony should have made the UMD as a recordable format allowing blanks to be purchased for music and video authoring. his would have created more sales on discs and recorder devices and as we all know would not have made a difference to the Piracy of the world. There are strategies they could have taken OS steps to make the recorded discs not boot games. It would have been no worse then what has happened already. However, once Pirates cracked it all they would have still sold blank discs and recorders for PC's. Another lost opportunity.

Anyway, the Pandora has taken a long time. However, when my wife points out it still hasn't come I ask her if she thinks I could have done it any faster myself. When she replies "No" then I remind her who is making the device and she may roll her eyes, but she understands the point. At least, so far, I haven't seen the Pandora team getting set to sabotage their own device like Sony (PS3 bad marketing, claiming it's cost make it not targeted at households) , Microsoft (Obviously throwing the 360 out figuring it would be cheaper to deal with failures after launch and HD-DVD lol), Sega (releasing 32x then mentioning the Saturn coming right after, Quitting the Dreamcast so soon), Atari, Osbourne, Commodore , so many have done some bad things to hurt themselves.

The worst we can come up with so far, is that it has taken too long? I'd say that bodes really well for the future.
 
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Na-Noo said:
In fact for almost a year, it's been pretty much all case related ! (As far as I can remember, and even then it could have been longer than that)
It was September, I believe, when the "45 days" it was expected to take passed and they hadn't even produced a single sample case.
It's kind of been bouncing back and forth between mass produced boards vs cases going to be the bottleneck.
The cases are definitely the hold up getting the first one out the door, but the board rate may end up being the hold up getting the last one.
At least when they do a Pandora 2 a few years from now, if they keep the same form factor as has been rumoured, we won't have to wait through all this again.
 
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WizardStan said:
Na-Noo said:
In fact for almost a year, it's been pretty much all case related ! (As far as I can remember, and even then it could have been longer than that)
It was September, I believe, when the "45 days" it was expected to take passed and they hadn't even produced a single sample case.
It's kind of been bouncing back and forth between mass produced boards vs cases going to be the bottleneck.
The cases are definitely the hold up getting the first one out the door, but the board rate may end up being the hold up getting the last one.
At least when they do a Pandora 2 a few years from now, if they keep the same form factor as has been rumoured, we won't have to wait through all this again.
I said a year believing it was very conservative. Ohhhhh as far back as Sept though.... :blink:

The actual board design was done very quickly though, and yea it may have gone through some other revisions, but I bet if the case was ready the boards would have been considered to be "good to go", or brought to that level very quickly.

Funny thing is, although as you said it was always said that it was bouncing between the boards and the case being the delay, we can see now that it would have always have been the case. If at any point the boards was ready there's no way that the cases would've come any quicker.

Guess I need to start thinking of the software I need to put on there soon. Fingers crossed :lol:
 
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borgqueenx said:
April 19th for your own pre-order?

You cant make a guess when you get your pandora if you dont know where you are in the que now...

im at about 3000 so i guess i will receive mine at about April the 25th or so.

The original guessing game was about the first real pandora to reach a real customers hands, I believe. Doesn't matter though, I was only joking to point out that no one knows and everything is just a guess at this point, just like it's always been.
 
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Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that after assembling 500 units, which should begin within the month, they would ship them.

If they receive the cases the 22nd, and start several days later, isn't it feasible that there would be several units shipped in early april?


I know I won't see one for a while yet, but we should have all of them shipped by June, right?


...right? ;__;
 
Amigo Bandito Crujiente said:
I know I won't see one for a while yet, but we should have all of them shipped by June, right?


...right? ;__;

We should. But you know what that means...
 
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