The UK’s newest assembly line is showing the first signs of life, with the arrival of several boxes of PSUs and one very tired pigeon. (A few Twitterers mistook the boxes for something else from China until Craig cracked one open for a closeup. Arrgh!) Note that a UK mains plug is shown, but you’ll be getting something to suit your region.

Tweets: [1] [2]

We all want news, and many of us are waiting with baited breath. So, when we have a bunch of news at once, we can wonder. Is this really good news, or are we just hoping? Well, we have some news from the Official blog. I hope everyone is as excited as I am.

EvilDragon

Chinese New Year holidays are over – work has begun at the factory!

We are in daily contact with them, so here is a brief roadmap of what should happen when:
At the moment, the machines are maintained, cleaned and prepared to go into normal production run again. Production will start during the next days, probably on Monday. Then lots of Pandora cases should be spit out each day
While they do this, we try to make them another Silkscreen sample and send us a picture of it (not the whole sample) within this week. If it’s fine, we’ll use the silkscreen – if not, we’ll just go with plain cases, to not waste anymore time.

As for the OS, the devs are really working hard on it right now (despite not having time, as they have so much things to do in real life).
It will surely not be the most polished OS ever released yet, but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple (and miss all the fun we’ll all have by enhancing the Pandora OS together!)

So, what can you expect, what will not work, where are tweaks needed?

What does work:

* The desktop fully works. It’s like a normal PC desktop. You have your file manager, your windows, your apps, etc.
* PND system is working. You can simply copy games onto your SD Card, put it into your Pandora – and PLAY!
* Apps: Installed apps do work fine so far. That includes Midori, Abiword, Orage, Pidgin, XChat, etc.
* Audio Playing: XMMS working fine.
* Movie Playing: Working… but has some issues (see below)
* USB Devices: You can connect USB Sticks, harddisks, mice, keyboard, etc. Normal things run out of the box.
* TV Out: The TV Out cable works fine, SVHS only for the moment though (see below)
* Power Saving Mode: Yep, it’s included and does work. At the moment, it should last for about 50 hours, not too long, but there might be a lot more components which could be switched off to save more power. Good enough to leave your Pandora lying around for a few hours without having to reboot it.
* LED Warning (Blinking) on low battery with automatic shutdown when the battery status becomes critical.
* Keyboard, us nub as mouse, touchscreen, everything working.

What issues are there?

* The biggest issue: WiFi is still work in progress. The driver works, without using SDIO it was slow (about 1200kbps), DJWillis is working on it, but it’s time consuming. It MIGHT be ready when the Pandora ships, but it might be WiFi will still take a bit longer. Maybe some devs want to help out here once they get a Pandora in their hands
* There’s no software audio mixer yet. This means you can only use the volume wheel. No big deal if you’re just listening to music or playing games, but multiple sounds at once will not work yet. Also, the equalizer isn’t yet working.
* Some apps have to be optimized for the small screen: Fullscreen apps like Midori, Abiword, etc. do look fine. Some stuff however (XFCE4 Settings, etc.) are using windows bigger than 800×480. They are completely usable, but you have to move the windows around to access all buttons.
* Movieplayer: While basic movie playing works, it does not use any hardware accelerations yet. DVD Quality xvid videos do play fine, but H264 is too much without hardware acceleration. Also, in windowed mode the videos are playing before the menus. Watching movies in fullscreen mode works nicely. Things should be way better when hardware support is included
* There is a lot to tweak and optimize here and there. Bootup speed can be increased, more themes (fingerfriendly ones?) could be created, some minor issues like the normal logout of Ubuntu-Netbook-Launcher doesn’t work (you need to use a menu entry), etc. Nothing serious that makes the unit not usable, but there are a lot of things that can be improved within the next months!

So, except for WiFi, all things do work well so far but can be optimized a lot.
Please don’t expect to have perfectly working games and emulators on day 1 – adopting to a new system will take some time and except for some core OS developers, nobody has a Pandora yet. Once delivered, games should start to pop up and become optimized pretty fast!

Some of that stuff might be fixed until first release – let’s hope for WiFi!

source

So, thanks to ED, we have some good news, but more to the point: some honest and fair news.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pickle gives us a peek at Aleph One M1A1, complete with clockspeed and keymap tweaks, and a clever hand that hardly gets in the way at all. For those quietly wondering, Aleph One is the enhanced open source descendant of Bungie’s Marathon 2: Durandal. The M1A1 variant completes the circle, bringing the levels & assets from the original Marathon into the Aleph One engine. More from Pickle’s Youtube text:

Im using the new gui to set the clock speed
I also show how key mapping works and finally some in game
Sorry hand is in the way at points and also couldnt play sound at the time of recording but it works.

Source

ED has posted another post on the official blog:

Well, Michael has already begun to wrap up one of those LCD cables in a nice shield. Those foils are REALLY thin, so there’s nothing we need to change with the case. It’s an easy fix.

The other thing you might want to know is that we placed our order for the production of those 3895 boards. Yep, mass production of the motherboards has started!

Now all that’s left to do is wait for the chinese company to finish the moulds. Yeeha!

Good news all around!

Drawing board to AppStore in 30 days. That’s the challenge being undertaken by craigix, zodttd and Ruckage, who are currently one week into development of their iPhone game Wizzley Presto and the Mysterious Time Machine. And they’re not just doing it for laughs; they’re blogging the entire process for the benefit of interested developers and anyone else who wants to go along for the ride. Once the game is released*, the first person to complete it will land themselves $1000.

Wait – what does an iPhone game have to do with Pandora? Ahh, that’s what rumour tags are for, dear readers. Keep an ear to the ground and an eye on the Twitterix…

Update: Those who have delved into the 30daygame site will know by now that Wizzley Presto is indeed bound for Pandora. Rumour no more!

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*Here we shall make reference to the potential for deadline jokes, so you don’t have to. Saving you time, that’s what we do here.

Thanks to Tripmonkey for the tip.

A typically enigmatic tweet on the Twitterix this morning…

Interesting conversation with 3D Realms. Now focusing on mobile platforms. Stay tuned.

Adding to the intrigue, a forum member caught this little gem on IRC last night:

[gbroussard] We’ve got our eye on a certain handheld in the open source scene. Seems like we’ve been waiting Forever to see it. But an announcement is just around the corner.

Who knows what to think…  all we know is, we’re definitely out of bubblegum.

Alright…I think I just got credited back my money from Amex.  Do I just follow the instructions everyone else was talking about?

I have to give Amex a call and double-triple make sure the credit is in my account before I go ahead and do anything, but I think I may just  be doing a transfer at my local bank.

How much would it be to send a cheque to OP?

Oh also, I got credited back the full amount I paid, So I am going to send the amount I got back to OP

Source

Things are moving pretty fast behind the scenes right now, you will be seeing a lot of nice stuff in the next 7-9 days.

You might even see something tonight

Oh, and not that anyone here will be holding them to it.

Source

Hello all, I know there is some apprehension in using Tranzfers.com. I figured I would give it a go and share my experience so that others would know what to expect or even decide for themselves. I was a bit confused on the whole reorder issue and after posting my frustrations it was suggested I email Open-Pandora, so I did. I got an email response by the very nice young lady, Jacquelyn in about 30 minutes. Already I am impressed with OpenPandora customer service. She gave me all of the bank transfer information I would need.

I headed over to Tranzfers.com and registered on the site using my email address and telephone information. About 5 minutes later I was greeted with an email instructing me of phone numbers available. If you are American or are otherwise unfamiliar with what the dialect the female voice greets you with when you dial the number, rest assured that she is greeting you with the name of the company, “OzForex.” Upon connecting to the Canadian number for the company, I was greeted by a gentleman named David B. who asked my my mailing address and the location I intended to send money to. I explained it was for the Pandora device and he immediately knew what I was talking about. He even briefly mentioned it was a Linux based device which to me means quite a few people have used this service already. He then explained an email would be sent to me with further instructions on how to set up an account. He mentioned I would need to scan a copy of my US Driver’s License and to also include a copy of a utility bill to show proof of residency. I would surmise this also aids in identity verification.

After the phone call I received an email verifying my registration and enclosing further instructions on how to finish the verification process. This is posted from the email:

WHAT WE NEED:
1. Photo ID in the form of either a current Driver’s License or Passport
2. Signed utilities bill or bank statement confirming your current address (not older than 3 months). Online bank statements or mobile phone bills are not acceptable as proof of address.

HOW YOU CAN PROVIDE IT (in order of preference)
1. Secure encrypted web upload (Digital photo file or scanned version of documents).
2. Email (Digital photo or scanned version of documents) compliance@tranzfers.com
3. Fax Copies of documents to:
London Dealing Room +44 20 7614 4180
Sydney Dealing Room +61 2 8667 8080
Toronto Dealing Room +1 416 214 7742

PLEASE NOTE
We will also verify your address by posting you an Address Verification Code Letter. Once received please enter the code into the website when prompted or you can simply email it back to us.

These requirements do not seem too unreasonable when considering the organization deals with international transfers of currency. I have just finished emailing a scan of my Driver’s License and my utility bill and am now awaiting confirmation so that I may make my payment. So far I have only spent a little over 30 minutes setting this up. I will update this thread when I move on to the next step. Again, it is my hopes to share this process so that others might understand it better.

Source

We’ll make an announcement via email and probably here as well when we’re ready to take orders for first batch leftovers and second batch preorders. If you’re interested, then I highly recommend you sign up for the newsletter on the official site.

Don’t expect this announcement until the first batch has mostly (if not completely) shipped.

The newsletter sign-up is in the top right hand corner of http://www.openpandora.org/ There is no signup confirmation.

Based on the timeline in the January update, that means not before February, possibly March.

EvilDragon
Faktisch weiß ich aber, dass die Pandora in den Produktionsendzügen liegt

Es gab noch eine Verzögerung vom Akkuhersteller (der hat das Design nochmals überarbeitet, deswegen mussten wir das Prototyp-Gehäuse verschieben (gibt ja keinen Sinn, wenn der Akku nicht passt ).
Vom finalen Akku wird derzeit ein Prototyp erstellt, der die nächsten Tage fertig wird – und kurz drauf ist das quasi fertige Gehäuse auf den neuen Akku angepasst. Und dann kommt WIRKLICH endlich das Prototyp-Gehäuse – denn dann haben wir alles, was dazu nötig ist.

Eine Auslieferung in den nächsten zwei Monaten ist in jedem Fall sehr wahrscheinlich.

Translation:
Pandora’s production just needs the last steps. There was another delay because the battery manufacturer refined the design an so we had to delay the prototype case, too(it doesn’t make any sense, when the battery doesn’t fit). At the moment a prototype of the final battery is being made and will be finished in the next days – shortly after that the final case will be adapted to the new battery. And then we REALLY will have the final prototype case – because we will have everything what is needed.

A delivery of Pandora in the next two months is very likely.

Original Source

Game update from benjymous showing the Box2D physics engine at work.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nice sprite from Dragons_Slayer from the Graphic Artist Needed thread.

Please follow the links and read the threads, and maybe leave some love,  if you like what you see.

For those that are unsure about normal refunds and re-ordering, I collected a lot of the information in one post and it is still valid.

We can have the battery indicator flashing, plus we can flash the LEDs on the device itself in an annoying enough fashion to get people to plug in the charger

So it looks like it’s possible to change how the LEDs behave through software.