If you follow the boards, you will probably already know this, but EvilDragon (owner of OpenPandora GmbH, currently manufacturing all Pandoras from Germany), has just released a couple of hours ago two important announcements. First, the 1Ghz unit is phasing out. Not immediately, but there are only parts remaining for about 500 1Ghz units and no more than that. Apparently there will also be about 150 Rebirth (at 600 Mhz) available as well. More importantly, there were talks about the successor of the Pandora.
In a different post, ED mentioned the following elements for the successor device are already fixed.
EDIT Nov 20: added new details based on more recent post from ED.
FIXED
- Size: Similar (maybe 1-2mm more on each side). Won’t be less thick for sure.
- Clamshell design
- Full sized SD Card slots
- USB Ports (1 or more?)
- Gaming Controls: nubs (no firmware, output i2c directly), Dpad, face buttons. 4 shoulder buttons have been announced.
- Replaceable battery (same one as before)
- Microphone: will be kept.
- Internal Memory: will use eMMC, single size prefered for production.
- Sound System: will keep same design as current Pandora.
- Compatibility with P1: yes, as much as possible.
BEING CONSIDERED
- New Nubs: new ones (samples being tested are working much better than current ones).
- LCD-Cable: with MIPI displays, no need for LCD Cables anymore.
- New Case: completely redesigned and produced by one company in Europe, for higher quality. There will more rounded edges. Color may be rendered through carbon plastic material.
- New LCD: Better refresh rate, higher resolution (ideally 720p, but that’s hard to get), size increased to 5″. Apparently unlikely to be resistive. Still not decided.
- Revised Keyboard: Slightly improved layout, better feel with potential backlight. Still needs lots of work, apparently.
- Wireless Connectivity: Improved Wifi, and potentially 3G/4G too. If 3G/4G happens the SIM slot will be below the battery.
- New Speakers: expected to be much better.
- New SoC: already confirmed apparently, but the model/specs are not disclosed. Note that this was, as far as I know, an important hurdle in the past few months.
- TV-out: currently thinking about microHDMI
- New Hinge: potentially with multiple steps, but still far from being done.
- Ordering System: not sure yet. For full production, preorders may be required, or ED may decide to use a loan or go through Kickstarter.
This is extremely interesting, because it finally confirms that a clear successor is in the works (I was in the know already for a while, but could not disclose anything).
As to when this will be ready for production and sale, well I don’t know how far the development has gone so far, nor how much ED is going to reply to other user requests (asking for more of this or more of that…). I strongly believe that Design is not a democratic process and that difficult decisions must be taken, if you don’t want to end up with the Homer car design when trying to fit everything into a single box.
This being said, I would not expect this Pandora successor to be released before the end of 2014, just knowing that some parts may take several months to be sourced (molds for plastic case elements themselves will probably take 3 to 6 months to be ready), several pilot runs will be needed at the assembling plant, design will probably need to be revised slightly once or twice to fix potential issues, etc… so I would say we won’t see anything in our ends before late 2014 or even 2015, but maybe ED will prove me wrong đ
It would certainly be positive to avoid too much of a gap in time between the time the 1Ghz unit runs out of stock, and the time the new successor is available. ED did however take a risk, with this announcement, to stall the sales of the current 1Ghz, since there is now clearly a new device at the corner. Some potential customers may decide they’d rather wait instead of purchasing a 1Ghz, for example. But he may already assume it will easy to get rid of the last units available.
Anyway, very good news for the future of the Pandora community, and for the world of alternative, open devices. We don’t have too much choice these days and I will definitely continue to actively support such platforms. Shit, I may have to change the name of the blog down the road as well. Aww. ăăăăȘăă
Yay, bigger screen and better nubs! I hope they won’t need reconfiguring on each restart.
And I really hope for more gaming buttons, it’s unreal to play some PS1 games now, without dedicated R2, L2
AFAIK, see my updated post (I added more info): ED confirmed 4 shoulder buttons, and that the nubs would not need firmware to operate (hence no need for reconfiguring).
I wish we get better touch screen responsiveness, convertible design (removable or 360 degrees hinges for the lower part) and overall thinner body đ
A thinner body would be ideal but I find it unlikely that will happen, I wonder if it’ll have day one support for android and linux… then again we’re talking about something that still a year off at best so best not to over think it.
Day 1 Linux, certainly, and hopefully several full distributions available and not just something like Super Zaxxon. Android, not sure, since we’ll need someone to support the port. It’s feasible, but there’s probably so much work to be done down the road that they’ll have to decide what to do first and what to delay.
Interesting news. I thought the 1GHz version was already out of stock. I’ve checked the listed shops a few times the last month or so, and they’ve all been constantly out of stock. Can you actually still get it anywhere?
They had some LCD supply issues a couple of months ago and it took some time to get the LCD replaced so for a while they were indeed out of stock. I haven’t checked right now in the Dragonbox Shop, because I know they ship the ones they produce to pre-orders as well with priority, so not sure how much they put for sale in parallel. In any case, –Marketing ON– I still have a couple of units with me in my Japan shop, if anyone’s interested to get one, pre-installed with applications and a nice Japanese Artwork box đ… Read more »
[…] – See more at: http://pandoralive.info/?p=2342#sthash.sj0MtXcU.dpuf […]
The firmwareless nubs and eMMC make me very happy. (With my current Rebirth edition Pandora, I have to reset the calibration on almost every second boot and I boot off an SD card to avoid depending on non-replaceable flash) The higher-resolution LCD with microHDMI is an idea that also pleases me since it would make the Pandora 2 even more useful as a way to carry a palmtop in my pocket and use it as a laptop replacement just by borrowing someone’s TV. I trust that it’ll work without a SIM card if there is 3G/4G support but I just… Read more »
Maybe you should send your Rebirth for a RMA – nubs should not behave like that.
As for the 3G/4G aspect I sincerely hope it will be optional, since I have no interest in that aspect myself. We’ll see.
I’d rather not be without it for that long and I’m already over-budget for holiday expenses so I’m not going to spend another cent. As far as I can tell, it’s just that my pattern of use gets the calibration confused so I wind up with asymmetric response where, for example, holding maximum up doesn’t move the cursor as quickly as maximum down does. It’s not always every two reboots… that’s just a common result of my nub-light, keyboard-heavy usage pattern where I use the nubs mainly to press certain specific buttons, the hotkeys for which I keep forgetting to… Read more »
Yeah, it’s difficult to be without Pandora for more than a few days… I had to send mine for RMA once and it was excruciating to wait for it to come back đ
Anyway. Maybe you could consider an upgrade in next year, instead of a RMA. That way you get something new with 1Ghz power đ After using my Rebirth for a long time and then the 1Ghz, I can say the upgrade is well worth what it costs.
Something I’ll consider.
It’ll probably have to be April at the earliest before I can afford an upgrade. I’ve got some expenses on the horizon that I need to save for first.
[…] the way, take a look at the most likely specs revealed a couple of days ago, if you missed them. We’ll probably hear more and more in the next 6 […]
[…] giorno successivo a quando ho fatto questa intervista ad EvilDragon ho visto prima un post su pandoralife.info e dopo ho letto che EvilDragon scrisse il 19 Novembre 2013, nel Pandora Forum , dove ha parlato […]