What Will Make Or Break Pandora.


Prophet said:
poopidoop2 said:
the pandora has a qwerty keyboard and awesome specs for games, but it lacks a backspace bar
Shoulder+DEL could act as BS. There are all sorts of ways to work around things.

I dunno about you guys, but I rarely use the delete key at all and only use backspace.
 
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I assume DEL is the backspace key. If it is actually mapped as a delete key, just re-map it to act as backspace.
 
Chip said:
I assume DEL is the backspace key. If it is actually mapped as a delete key, just re-map it to act as backspace.
What if you have a 100 page flight sim for the Amiga emulator and the delete key is 'eject' and the backspace is 'white latte coffee with sugar' or something!? Now i don't want to sound picky but it would screw my top gun mission up, though i would have a nice latte on the paracute down!
 
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The only thing that concerns me about the Pandora is the custom battery. Over ten hours is great, but does this mean that five years down the line when my battery dies I'll be screwed?
 
Falcon Delta said:
The only thing that concerns me about the Pandora is the custom battery. Over ten hours is great, but does this mean that five years down the line when my battery dies I'll be screwed?
No more so than with any other device. There is no such thing as a "standard" Li-ion battery. Even if they went with an off-the-shelf part, there is no guarantee that it would still be manufactured in 5 years either.
 
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Falcon Delta said:
The only thing that concerns me about the Pandora is the custom battery. Over ten hours is great, but does this mean that five years down the line when my battery dies I'll be screwed?
I think the battery will last a little longer than five years! I've various batterys from gadgets from years ago and although the battery is like 75% of what is was works fine no problem, plus didn't i read somewhere that the battery could be changed somehow without taking it all apart or was it in a dream!?
 
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"You don't have to worry, we are here on the forums every day answering your questions, we won't hide away like GPH, Gizmondo, Tapwave etc."

HAHAHAHAHA Gizmondo now that was a flop.
 
Death_Pigeon said:
"You don't have to worry, we are here on the forums every day answering your questions, we won't hide away like GPH, Gizmondo, Tapwave etc."

HAHAHAHAHA Gizmondo now that was a flop.
In terms of who ran the company yeah it was, but at the same time it had more commercial games than the GP32, GP2X and Zodiac and ran full sat nav software and afterwards ran homebrew and emulators....so depends on which way on look at it.

But i don't want to start another argument on this topic just to say the Gizmondo has its fans but was let down big time by its owners.
 
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Considering revenue, I'd say Gizmodo would be a great example of a flop. Atleast the Zodiac seemed to do ok for a while and the gp32 and gp2x would have made money.

Gizmodo is a flop in the same way that betamax was a flop. Noone will say that it is worse than VCR, but it still failed to be profitable.
 
I agree with the OP on the importance of build quality in the success of pandora, but the other important 'make or break' factor from where I'm standing revolves around the choice of default packages and their configuration in the pand OS.

It been discussed in several threads already although I'm unsure what the devs have got planned OS wise apart from it will be Linux based, which really doesn't mean much other than we know what kernel will be used and there's a wide variety of GUIs that sit atop the Linux kernel, some X11 based some not.

Its generally been agreed that pand needs to ship with both a 'I don't like computers-user', gmenu2x style gui as well as an X11 based gui for doing serious work with and taking advantage of the 1000s of great X apps out there. The gmenu2x style interface needs to be kept simple-as and so shouldn't be a big problem for the devs in producing something that does the job but my concerns lie in how well the X11 environment is put together because if its done well it could have major repercussions for the whole world of computing, giving desktop LInux a big push from the embedded world.

Why? Reason being that this really hasn't been done before. Just like the pdaXii13 x11 OS on the Zaurus, the pandora team can have everything customised specifically for the platform so that everything 'just works' out of the box kinda like OSX on Macs but with more apps included by default (look at how many cool apps Meanie crammed into 250MB for pdaXii13- loads of stuff). Yes, you could install pdaXii13 on a zaurus but it was never sold officially/ pre-installed and you had to have a certain level of geek skill just to install it or even know it existed. On top of that, modern Linux desktop distros such as Mandriva and SUSE have all but obliterated any need for a normal user to ever need to use the command line and Linux really is as easy as, if not easier to use than Windows now. The only problem with Linux on PCs is whether your hardware is supported or not- Linux supports a lot more hardware than vista but as I said already this isn't a problem on pandora- it'll just be a case of how well your peripherals are supported and most will work out-of-the-box.

There's a lot of talk in the tech press now on how Linux is going to take over the budget computing market and Pandora has the chance to be the shining star and the major catalyst. You can't run winxp on the super-power efficient ARM chipsets a lot of these mobile devices use and even if you could it would run like a dog with only 128MB RAM but Linux manages to nip along nicely in these conditions. Seeing as most of the world has never heard of the Zaurus they are unaware that 'pocket desktop' computing is a reality and so the Pandora will be most peoples first exposure to this new computing paradigm- it will also be the first time many use Linux as a 'desktop' OS so everything needs to be made as simple as can be without removing the power and flexibility of the X11 desktop- I'm thinking a kind of combination between Mandriva 2008.1 XFCE and pdaXii13.

I've been testing/using Linux distros and FOSS software for 12 years now and I was one of main bug testers/ idea mongers involved with pdaXii13 so if team pandora needs any help in this respect I'd be happy to package-pick, tweak and test!
 
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