Panasonic Ventures Into New Territory – The Jungle

Well this is an unlikely and rather surprising turn up for the books. Japanese firm Panasonic (or their newly founded offshoot company ‘Panasonic Cloud Entertainment’) are reportedly working on a new handheld device with the sole purpose of playing MMO games on the go. The machine is said to run on Linux, have a super high resolution screen and a full keyboard as well as gaming controls of some sort.

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A Dingoo Successor Emerges… The Gemei A330

In the baffling world of Chinese firm Dingoo Digital (or is that Dingoo Technologies? Does anyone care anymore?) nothing is black and white. It seems that both mobs are quite happy firing accusations at one another for breach of copyright and theft of source code at the moment (If you want to trawl the long and confusing drama that is “Who is the real Dingoo team?” then you could start here but I wouldn’t advise it).

What is certain (or as close as you’re going to get) is that the company behind the manufacture of the Dingoo A320 was Gemei, a reputable Chinese electronics company.

18 or so months after the Dingoo A320 landed, and after a lot of leaked photographs, wild speculation, a fake successor and a whole load of hullabaloo over at the dingoonity forums, it finally seems that the real successor is about to land – and this time it comes with some official pics.

Over at the dingoonity forums, one of the staff members from Chinavasion posted to say that they would be taking stock of the new machine “soon”.

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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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The Nintendo Game Boy Advance Clone

I came across this a few months ago on DealExtreme. The Game Boy Advance was the first handheld I owned, my brother and I were driven up to Toys R Us by our Dad on the hot summer launch day back in 2001 and we parted with our hard saved cash to grab one each. I recall attempting  to play F Zero Maximum Velocity in the car on the way home and having a very hard time keeping the bright sunlight off the non-lit LCD screen.

So almost 10 years later, and with a promise of a fully working clone with a back lit screen (wooohooo) and the ability to load any GBA game I felt like I could not resist.

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