Why. I'm glad you asked!

The Pandora can be seen as the spiritual successer to the GP2X. What is the GP2X you ask? You really should know by now, but it's a hand held centered around homebrew and multimedia, made by the Korean company Game Park Holdings. The reason that the Pandora came about was because the GP2X was Korean, and the Koreans never really got us Westeners, for example they fucked the Joystick to hell, and the screen was all interlaced when it moved. There are many other reason such as the GP2X just being based on a strange system that developers found it hard to use to it's full power and It's lack of 3D processing.

Now the Pandora came about when Craigix and his bunch (you don't need to know who they are, but you can find more at the pandora website, at the end of this blog post) decided if you want something, you might as well do it your self. After much searching around, companies telling that creating the Pandora was stupid Texus Industries got in contact with Craig and decided to let them use a new chip, before any one in the world, Nokia and big name companys like that.

Now thats how the Pandora came about, what is the Pandora. At it's heart the Pandora is a Opensource console that runs linux. Now the great thing about the Pandora is that it has many, many, MANY talented coders from the GP2X scene coding for it. So that means on launch we can expect things like all the usual emulators, but some more advanced things like the possibility full Speed PS1 and N64 emulation. The console has a touch screen for easy mouse, and and a clam shell design for portablity.

The specs of the Pandora are

* 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 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
(taken straight from the Pandora website)


The first batch of Pandoras (Panoraii?) should be out for Christmas, with the second batch in 2009.

For more info go to
http://openpandora.org/