EvilDragon Announces A Pandora Successor, The Pyra

Michael Mrozek was one of the main guys behind the original Pandora concept in 2009, and at FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) yesterday he announced his own successor to the ageing machine – the Pyra. In the videos below, Michael (otherwise known as EvilDragon on the OpenPandora boards) outlines his goals …

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Pandora Team Gets To Work On A New Product

Craigix, the man behind the OpenPandora console, has recently launched a KickStarter project in which he is hoping to raise $150,000 for his new project. The new project isn’t a console, but rather a controller. It is the follow up to the iControlPad and hopes to improve upon the design of the original, as well as …

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Pandora. The holy grail of handheld gaming?

Pandora is marketed as the most powerful gaming handheld on the market to date. Although it has full gaming controls, it also boasts a keyboard and runs a full Linux desktop environment meaning it can also be used as a very tiny PC of sorts. Check the specifications out below:

  • ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
  • 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ 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
  • Around 10+ Hours battery life

The machine was designed by the community at the GP32X forums, and steered in a workable direction by the OpenPandora team. The final result was this; a fully functioning computer that can do everything a computer can do, with full gaming controls and the ability to play graphically impressive games, both natively and emulated. The software is completely Open Source, meaning anyone can take any piece of its huge library of software and modify or improve it as they feel fit. This includes the Operating System!

No, the cup isn’t big – the machine is small 🙂

I am the proud owner of one of these, and I’d like to share with you some of the things I have discovered in the short time I’ve owned it.

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