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Any open Pandora users in here?
I got a "Rebirth" one used on eBay about a year ago. I was waiting for the hype and excitement to die down and for the company to work out the hardware flaws.
While it is a pleasant escape from Nintendo vs. flaky flashcarts, the build quality (I would never subject this device's touchscreen to a scribblefest like Pokemon Ranger!) of the device is a bit lacking, even with the "Rebirth" improvements. Unfortunately, it has its own Linux issues. There are two GUIs: a fast and light game launcher and a pretty standard clunky Linux desktop that looks like something-box or LXDE. Unless I'm editing rc/ini files or moving roms around, I pretty much live in the game launcher.
GBA/GB/SNES/N64/DOS/PSP/NDS emulation feels pretty solid but all the emus have different UIs and in spite of some really intense efforts of programmers, I still think NDS games are no fun to play single screen and the top touchscreen is just awkward to use.
People rave about the "full desktop," and the very good audio quality, but I am so not going to use the awkwardly-sized (too big to thumb type, way too small to type normally) keyboard for any kind of programming/scripting/text-adventuring. The audio quality makes we want to get a big uSD card but the lack of a decent linux iTunes-like application pretty much kills this device as a music player. DEADBEEF is really not nice enough for a large music collection on a small screen. (On desktop linux systems, I've tried rhythmbox, amarok, banshee, and a few more strangely-named linux audio programs and found the interfaces somewhat strange and audio quality hit-or-miss, thanks to the pulseaudio soundserver mess. btw, why do so many linux applications have bizarre names which give no clue as to their function?)
I got a "Rebirth" one used on eBay about a year ago. I was waiting for the hype and excitement to die down and for the company to work out the hardware flaws.
While it is a pleasant escape from Nintendo vs. flaky flashcarts, the build quality (I would never subject this device's touchscreen to a scribblefest like Pokemon Ranger!) of the device is a bit lacking, even with the "Rebirth" improvements. Unfortunately, it has its own Linux issues. There are two GUIs: a fast and light game launcher and a pretty standard clunky Linux desktop that looks like something-box or LXDE. Unless I'm editing rc/ini files or moving roms around, I pretty much live in the game launcher.
GBA/GB/SNES/N64/DOS/PSP/NDS emulation feels pretty solid but all the emus have different UIs and in spite of some really intense efforts of programmers, I still think NDS games are no fun to play single screen and the top touchscreen is just awkward to use.
People rave about the "full desktop," and the very good audio quality, but I am so not going to use the awkwardly-sized (too big to thumb type, way too small to type normally) keyboard for any kind of programming/scripting/text-adventuring. The audio quality makes we want to get a big uSD card but the lack of a decent linux iTunes-like application pretty much kills this device as a music player. DEADBEEF is really not nice enough for a large music collection on a small screen. (On desktop linux systems, I've tried rhythmbox, amarok, banshee, and a few more strangely-named linux audio programs and found the interfaces somewhat strange and audio quality hit-or-miss, thanks to the pulseaudio soundserver mess. btw, why do so many linux applications have bizarre names which give no clue as to their function?)
