TheBestNaruto101 said:
anyone planning on buying this?
As I mentioned in the 2nd post, I had been until I saw the price and looked around at what else was currently available and would be available shortly in a similar or slightly higher price range.
That said just about everything else in the price range is a better deal, specifically various current netbooks all capable of PSX emulation and other console emulation, only lacking builtin game controllers, however since they are basically cheap PCs they come with all the standard ports, USB/VGA/multi-card readers/etc. thereby allowing pretty much any controller you'd like or just to make do with trackpad + keyboard. Most of the netbooks come base with 512M and SSD drives, but I'd go for the 1GB+ with some type of SATA hd as they're usually cheaper and often ship with a larger battery by default, (added hd power draw) but still run longer and perform better overall than the SSD based devices. (Most of the SSD ones apparently only use a "fast" drive for a minimal install portion typically 4GB or 8GB, and the remainder of the spec SSD drive size 8-32GB is usually on a slower(cheaper) SSD. Also I'm not sold on SSD lifetime yet either as these are all FLASH RAM based which has a limited number of write cycles before failure.)
All of the netbooks already come with WiFi, and some of the upcoming models will be able to support 3G and GPS. It looks like some will be supporting models that do both OOB, as an early preview of one has empty slots for both.
Additionally they can run linux/XP/OSX -> tons of flexibility and the ability to run some fairly recent windows games as long as they don't require TONS of CPU/GPU horspower as most of the netbooks currently available are deficient in this regard wrt reent top end games. However, going a tiny bit higher, you could pick up a Turion X2 system with a fairly decent nVidia/Radeon integrated GPU which while not the greatest would allow you more flexibility in actually being able to run some more recent games, albeit not at the highest setting/resolution. (But what do you want for CHEAP?) Most of the Turion systems also happen to have DVD multi-R/W drives which are lacking on the true netbooks, although all of this comes at the expense of battery runtime, as in you're back to looking at typical notebook runtime 2.5-3h, but some of the netbooks are in that range as well especially the ones that sport only 3cell batteries. The Turion systems that I've looked at usually come with at least 3GB of DDR2 RAM, 2GHz Turion X2 nVidia 9100 M to 1.3GHz Turion x2/2GB RAM/er I forget the GPU might've been either the Radeon x1250 (~Intel x3100 level not too good) or the 3200 (better), but this one also had a twistable touch enabled LCD allowing it to be used in a tablet configuration(not available in the US ATM).
There were also some via C7-M based machines, but I'd hold out for nano based personally if you must go VIA for some reason.
Like I said above, I'm going to hold out and see what happen when Intel Atom N330, and hopefully, VIA Nano based systems start appearing along with hopefully more Paulsbo(PowerVR based not Intel crap) GPU chipsets for the Atom, although I'm almost thinking about just going Turion x2 for about double the cost(maybe a little less if I can find some sales) with a MUCH better GPU but in a 14-15" form factor (yech, but they'll all come with DVD R/W drives as well, which none of the true netbooks do, some of them almost have better specs than my current desktop already although their GPUs are pretty weak and not dedicated.)
The price is just wrong on the Pandora, but there's not much that they can do about it ATM as they are obviously using a custom board and using CPUs that are not very common, and I don't think that they'll ever sell enough of them to really brind the price down sufficiently to compete with the netbooks which can already do more than the Pandora.
An iPod touch was in the running for a bit too, but again, netbooks just do more, and I really don't like not having an easily user-replaceable battery on ANY device. That's just a complete showstopper for me.
[EDIT]
Did some further investigation and turned up these guys:
http://www.avadirect.com/
They have some nice barebones 2.26GHz Centrino 2 Duo 2 (WTF?!) notebooks with nVidia Geforece 9600M GTs 512MB.
The 9600M GT gets some pretty decent benchmarks -> current gaming. Drawback is that these are a 15.4" (HUGE!) form factor and the $915 barebones only comes with 1GB RAM & 80GB hdd, no WiFi, etc. But all of these can be added, WiFi card is ~$30 extra, and 320GB hdds can be added for ~$45, 160 for ~ $15 (extra).
Comes with no OS, but you can buy/have installed XP/Vista/linux distro or just do it yourself.
Also note, these things look like ugly puppies too, but the price seems to be great for the components.
[/EDIT]
riginal Statement:]The preorder date is now set - it's the 30th of September, the Pandora will start shipping at the end of November.
