The Pandora is a new handheld game console with some secondary Netbook functionality. Unlike most game consoles which come from some big, well-heeled corporation, and are intended for mass production and mass marketing, the Pandora is produced by hackers for hackers. A small group of people in the United Kingdom are behind this undertaking.
The unit itself is still in initial production, and none have yet been shipped, but it's rather unlike any currently produced handheld game console. It's about the size of the classic Nintendo DS, in a clamshell form factor. The upper half holds an 800x480 touchscreen, while the lower half has the gaming controls and keyboard. For gaming controls, it includes two analog sticks, a D-pad, four standard fire buttons, three auxiliary buttons and two shoulder triggers. It also includes a reduced QWERTY keyboard below and a row of 12 function keys above the gaming controls.
The heart of the system is a Texas Instruments OMAP-3 ARM system-on-a-chip, consisting of a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU, a DSP and a PowerVR SGX 530 3D accelerator. This is coupled to 256MB of low-power DDR SDRAM and 512MB of onboard Flash. It also includes 802.11g Wi-fi, Bluetooth, two high-capacity SD slots and a high-speed USB 2.0 EHCI controller. It will run a variant of Angstrom Linux, or the ARM port of Ubuntu.
Eventually there will be a library of native games for the Pandora, but unlike most new consoles, it already has quite a few. Most, if not all free games for Linux will run acceptably on it, and it's also a fantastic platform for emulation. Currently the following systems can be emulated well:
Computers
- IBM PC, all the way up to low-end Pentium-level performance
- Apple Macintosh 68k variants, up to 68040-level performance
- Commodore Amiga up to a 68010 with ECS chipset at full speed, or a 68020 with AGA at near full speed
- Atari ST
- Most 8-bit machines
- Acorn Archimedes systems
Besides being a game console, the keyboard allows it to function as a useful mini-netbook. It can run most open-source Linux applications, including Abiword, Gnumeric, the Xchat IRC client, Pidgin, Firefox or its slimmer cousin Fennec, and even BitTorrent clients. The biggest drawback is that the keyboard is relatively cramped. It's bigger than the keyboard on devices like the T-Mobile Sidekick, but not much. It wouldn't be bad for a quick node or two, but I wouldn't want to use it to write a book.
All in all, it's quite an interesting device, both as a gaming machine and as a very light computer for travel. It's not very expensive, either, at about $350 - which, all things considered, is a fantastic price for so much power, especially when the company can't take advantage of economies of scale to any great extent. Pre-orders are expected to open up again in late December - keep an eye out!
Sources: www.openpandora.org, pandorawiki.org, Wikipedia.