Pandora – Forum Designed Open Source Portable Gaming Machine

Say hello to Pandora – that’s not the name of the lovely lady, I’m talking about what she has in her hands.

The handheld is roughly the same size as the Nintendo DS (actual dimensions: 140×83x27mm (5.51×3.27×1.06 in)) and it kinda resembles the Nintendo DS lite.

Pandora is an open end platform that will specialise in homebrew applications and games.

The Pandora developers have already shown working emulators for PlayStation, Amiga, Super NES, Atari Jaguar and Sega Mega Drive software.

The Pandora is a unique machine. It was designed based on the input of thousands of forum users with one goal in mind – to make the ultimate open source handheld device and it is said that it can cope with things such as Firefox3 or Quake3 with ease.

It has an estimated 8.5-10+ hour battery life for games, 10+ hour battery life for video and general applications and, theoretically, 100+ hours for music playback (with backlight off and maximum power management).

Apparently there’s a number of Pandoras left from the first batch and if you are interested in buying one you have to email openpandorasales@gmail.com and one will cost you $330.

I really dig the to-do list on the Pandora site – nice touch

Now. Here’s the science bit:

ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux

430-MHz TMS320C64x+â„¢ DSP Core

PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware

800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD

Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host

Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output

Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls

43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad

Texas Instruments OMAP3530 System-on-Chip with Cortex-A8 at 600MHz

256MB DDR-333 SDRAM

512MB NAND FLASH memory

IVA2+ audio and video processor (based on the TMS320C64x+ DSP Core at 430MHz) using Texas Instruments’s DaVinci technology

PowerVR SGX 530 (110 MHz) OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant 3D hardware

Integrated Wi-Fi 802.11b/g

Integrated Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (3Mbit/s) (Class 2, +4dBm)

Headphone output up to 150mW/channel into 16 ohms, 99dB SNR

TV output (composite and S-Video)

Internal microphone plus ability to connect external microphone through headset

Externally accessible UART for hardware hacking and debugging

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