A Working Pyra Prototype!

It took a long time to get to this point, but ED and his team has finally achieved it! A fully working Pyra prototype! Looks like you won’t have to wait too long now to get your hands on something tangible (hopefully within 2016) to replace your existing Pandora, or to jump on the ship if you did not have any Pyra-like handheld until now.

Here’s the video of the prototype in action. I recommend you watch this full screen in HD (720p at least) in order to see the details half way in the video.

While this is pretty much a working prototype, there are still some remaining items to be worked on:

• The keyboard needs to be properly mapped
• The OS currently has no hardware acceleration, making everything X displays pretty slow
• Text size may need to be adjusted as well
• The action buttons will be given more height to avoid pressing on the neighbouring keyboard keys.
• There is no heat sink on this model, so heat dissipation should be better later on.
• The speakers are not yet supported in the current OS (drivers not included).

The nubs seems to be way more precise than the Pandora’s, which is a great relief since this was one of the major kind of issues with the Pandora.

So what are the next steps ? 1) Finalizing the unit (final mold, OS tweaks/optimization, adjustments) 2) Financing the production (pre-orders are likely) and 3) preparing for the first real manufacturing run.

It will still take a while, but now it looks the major bumps are likely behind us.