The first thing in gaming I've been excited about since Crazy Frog Racer 2

Well, that one didn't turn out so good, but I 've got *very* high hopes for this. Sure it's ugly as sin, has been considered vaporware since the beginning of development over two years ago, and has little to no hype outside the hardcore pocket-gaming enthusiast, but I'm like a goddam kid two weeks before christmas thinking about this little bad boy. Behold, the open pandora. I have a pre-order for the first batch, which they SWEAR will be shipping in October. I'm not holding my breath, but it seems like the project is finally on track.



Specs

* ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
* 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
* PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
* 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours pressure-sensitive capacative 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

So what does it do? a better question is what doesn't it do. Basically a netbook PC designed with the emulating gamer / hacker in mind, it's like a GP2X on steroids. With more RAM and a faster processor than the PSP, it can emulate anything from the PS1 and below, and there are rumors of a PSP game emulator in the works, with N64 support confirmed. It runs full DOSBOX for SCUMM games etc, and with a touchscreen, qwerty keyboard and finally a screen big enough to see that tiny text, makes for an amazing handheld with my intended use as a mobile Lucasarts adventure game center. oh yeah, it also runs networked Quake 3 Arena at 60FPS

On top of that, expect to see the full gamut of user-developed apps like synth trackers, drawing pads, animation (It can run Blender!), full firefox 3 support for web browsing, flash games, original apps, productivity suites, etc. It's a little pricey, but not when you consider it it's also a PMP with a bigass screen (bigger and brighter than psp) and support for all major video formats, with up to 128 GB in storage for music and videos. That's a better deal than an ipod touch, and it's way less, with more features. I will be posting a full report the instant I get my sweaty, greasy hands on it. Right after I come all over the screen from joy