So, Who's getting a Pandora?

Antiriad2097 · Post by **Antiriad2097** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 7:21 am

How does it compare to an eeePC with a USB joystick, that's what I want to know?

The Master · Post by **The Master** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 7:31 am

It's smaller.

Matt_B · Post by **Matt_B** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 7:39 am

The Master wrote:It's smaller.

A lot smaller.

Let me put it this way: I wouldn't replace my Eee PC with one, but I might consider replacing my Palm TX with it.

boyo · Post by **boyo** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 8:53 am

Just read up on this - very tempted.

Personally thought the GP2x was a turkey - very bad control stick with rubish firmware.

Antiriad2097 · Post by **Antiriad2097** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 9:06 am

I'll rephrase (because I like the screen size on eePC).

How does Pandora compare to one of those in performance and spec terms?

JetSetWilly · Post by **JetSetWilly** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 9:50 am

i am very temped with one of these. But 200 quid on something that might not deliver first time round is a lot of money to waste.
I'll give it till after chrimbo, then buy on.

Matt_B · Post by **Matt_B** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 11:44 am

Antiriad2097 wrote:I'll rephrase (because I like the screen size on eePC).

How does Pandora compare to one of those in performance and spec terms?

In terms of spec, it's not even close with only a 600MHz CPU and 128MB RAM, although it might give some of the lower end netbooks (e.g. Elonex One, OLPC XO-1) a run for their money.

As for how that translates into performance, we'll have to wait and see, but it's definitely up to the job of Amiga emulation and ought to be capable of other systems up until the mid-90s as well as web-browsing and video playback. You probably wouldn't want to run OpenOffice.org on it though.

That said, the Pandora should easily hold its own against anything of similar size, at least for the time being.

Dudley · Post by **Dudley** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 4:03 pm

A mate at work is getting one so I'll let him find the errors first.

Antiriad2097 · Post by **Antiriad2097** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 4:12 pm

Matt_B wrote:
Antiriad2097 wrote:I'll rephrase (because I like the screen size on eePC).

How does Pandora compare to one of those in performance and spec terms?
In terms of spec, it's not even close with only a 600MHz CPU and 128MB RAM, although it might give some of the lower end netbooks (e.g. Elonex One, OLPC XO-1) a run for their money.

Right, I've just looked up eeePC specs. Its very close at that price point. Around Â£200 for a Pandora with 600Mhz CPU Vs Â£170 for an eeePC with a 630Mhz CPU.

Yes, there are eeePCs of higher spec, but at much higher cost so you're looking at laptops for competition, not Pandora.

Matt_B · Post by **Matt_B** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 5:25 pm

Antiriad2097 wrote:Right, I've just looked up eeePC specs. Its very close at that price point. Around Â£200 for a Pandora with 600Mhz CPU Vs Â£170 for an eeePC with a 630Mhz CPU.

Yes, there are eeePCs of higher spec, but at much higher cost so you're looking at laptops for competition, not Pandora.

Just looking at the clock speeds probably isn't very instructive. The early Eee PCs have a Celeron-M which gives very good performance at relatively low clock speeds, but is quite power hungry which is why it's underclocked. The ARM8 in the Pandora is the other way around; the performance is limited (although developers do also have a built in GPU and DSP to exploit) but it's very power efficient.

In any case, the Pandora also has very little RAM which will also limit performance and you can get netbooks from other manufacturers with 1.6GHz Atoms for under Â£200 right now before it's even been launched.

Not that this particularly matters much, as it fits into a much smaller form factor and isn't really competing against them.

rupert · Post by **rupert** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 5:44 pm

Matt_B wrote:
Antiriad2097 wrote:Right, I've just looked up eeePC specs. Its very close at that price point. Around Â£200 for a Pandora with 600Mhz CPU Vs Â£170 for an eeePC with a 630Mhz CPU.

Yes, there are eeePCs of higher spec, but at much higher cost so you're looking at laptops for competition, not Pandora.
Just looking at the clock speeds probably isn't very instructive. The early Eee PCs have a Celeron-M which gives very good performance at relatively low clock speeds, but is quite power hungry which is why it's underclocked. The ARM8 in the Pandora is the other way around; the performance is limited (although developers do also have a built in GPU and DSP to exploit) but it's very power efficient.

In any case, the Pandora also has very little RAM which will also limit performance and you can get netbooks from other manufacturers with 1.6GHz Atoms for under Â£200 right now before it's even been launched.

Not that this particularly matters much, as it fits into a much smalle

r form factor and isn't really competing against them.

Befor I type this I'm going to say I know nothing about how a computer actually works other than the very basics (so don't all flame me to death

)

If the Pandora has roughly 256 times more RAM than the original Amiga 500 did, does this not mean it has more than enough to serve it's purpose?

RocketRanger · Post by **RocketRanger** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 5:47 pm

I use my eee pc (original 701 4gb with the original Linux operating system, writing this very message on it in fact) to emulate Amiga games, its pretty neat for Cannon Fodder and Syndicate.

But unless the emulator can 'save state' or hard drive support, hand held Amiga emulation isn't practicle. The GP2X, for example, has a convincing port of UAE on it. But your train journey will be mostly finished by the time the game has loaded, not to mention having to go back to the menu to swap disks. Hand held "It came from the desert"? Hand held virtual disk swap nightmare more like..

sleeper77 · Post by **sleeper77** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 6:37 pm

Like others have said here I will wait some months before making any considerations to buy it based what those who bought it say here and on other forums. Also from the specs quoted, I'm not sure it can run 32 bit systems at full speed unless they have coded the emulators to make the most out of the console. Maybe early PS1 and N64 games that didn't use so much processing power will come out fine. 16 bit emulation should not be a problem though. What will be more interesting to see is the battery power. The GP2X only lasted 3 to 4 hours on fresh batteries. So for me I can happily wait and see if the Pandora lives up to what some have been hoping, which is the ultimate retro handheld machine.

Matt_B · Post by **Matt_B** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 4:31 am

rupert wrote:Befor I type this I'm going to say I know nothing about how a computer actually works other than the very basics (so don't all flame me to death )

If the Pandora has roughly 256 times more RAM than the original Amiga 500 did, does this not mean it has more than enough to serve it's purpose?

Sure, no flames.

I'm not in the slightest bit worried about the Pandora not having enough RAM for the purposes of Amiga emulation; if it can do anything at all, that's pretty much going to be a given. It should also be able to emulate a bunch of other systems, possibly up to and including the Playstation, play homebrew games and run a lightweight version of Linux and some reasonably compact applications.

What it's not got enough RAM for are operating systems like Ubuntu, bloaty applications like OpenOffice.org and some of the bigger open source games. It also won't run anything that depends explicitly on the x86 architecture and/or requires excessive amounts of graphical acceleration. As such, people shouldn't expect it to have the same capabilities as netbooks like the Eee PC; it's not meant to, but it should be at least as good as anything you can fit in your pocket.

elmosexwhistle · Post by **elmosexwhistle** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 7:13 am

holy crap! so i could have a fully functioning version of Octamed in my pocket, to take around everywhere and annoy people with?

hot.

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So, Who's getting a Pandora?

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