Saturday April 5, 2008
Pandora - Linux Portable Games ConsoleWell my quest for a low cost portable Linux box (as opposed to the desktop PC which I now have) continues, and Open Pandora looks a very interesting open portable box with these features:

* ARM® Cortex™-A8 CPU running Linux
* 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colors touchscreen LCD
* OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
* Wifi 802.11b/g
* Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
* 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
* High Speed USB Port
* 128MB of DDR SDRAM plus 256MB of internal flash memory.
All this selling for about £200 (UK) or $330 which makes it very attractive. A touch screen, a fast ARM chip, the OpenGL 3D hardware and of course WiFi Access make this pretty advanced. Running Debian Linux it should make an ideal open games console. Whether any major games company will want to develop for it is another matter given the relative ease of copying games so perhaps it's better suited to acting as a client to server based subscription games as well as running emulations like Mame. With the touchscreen - similar to that used in SatNav systems, I could see this having a lot of non-game uses.