Pandora’s Box — Closed

Even though I still consider myself a gadget guy, I’m not the early adopter I once was. Back in the pre-M and M (Mason and Morgan) years, I kept a steady stream of new electronic devices flowing through the house. That stream has slowed a bit over the past few years, and these days I try to not buy every single new electronic gadget that comes along, instead saving my cash for the ones I really want. One such device was the recently announced Pandora.

The Pandora was/is an open source hand held gaming system, announced last summer. It was designed by three guys who have dealt with the GP32 and GP2X consoles. On the outside, the Pandora is roughly the same shape and size as a Nintendo DS. Once you flip the clamshell case open, the differences are immediately apparent: the bottom section contains a full keyboard, a d-pad, two analog sticks, and four buttons (plus two shoulder buttons). The top part contains a touch screen. Built into the machine are two SD slots for storage, WiFi, bluetooth and am external USB 2.0 port.

The inside of the unit is even more impressive. The Pandora runs off an ARM processor — two, actually. It runs a stripped down version of Linux, but apparently it can run Ubuntu. It’s got 256 meg of RAM and 512 of flash storage which is plenty for the unit’s intended purpose: emulating games. Even before the unit’s (first) projected street date, videos of dev units playing Amiga, Super Nintendo, Genesis and even PlayStation games appeared on YouTube. Additionally, the unit can be used as an mp3 player (up to 100 hours of playback with the screen turned off), a video/picture viewer, a portable eBook reader, and even a mini-computer.

The Pandora is, for all intents and purposes, the ideal device for gamers and tinkerers. It is designed to play my favorite era of games (16-bit/2D) and has enough expandability to keep me interested in it for years. And that is why, when pre-sales of the Pandora became available, I jumped on the opportunity.

Paying for things in British pounds is always a fun surprise as you never know what the exchange rate is going to do for you, and in this case my credit card was charged $330. This was back in last October, with a promise that the devices would “arrive in your hands before Christmas.” Pardon the cliche, but what follows can only be described as a “comedy of errors.”

On December 1st, I received an e-mail announcing the “great news!” that the Pandora was being upgraded from 128 meg of RAM to 256 meg, and that 512 meg of NAND (flash storage) had been added! Hooray, right? Well, almost. Along with that “great news” was that all credit card orders had been canceled and refunds were being issued. “There is no charge for this upgrade — we are paying for it!” the e-mail said. Well, kind of. My refund, due to market fluctuations, was $287.36 (I originally paid $352.78). So already I was back to where I started — no Pandora and no payment — and I was out $65.

Things have gone downhill from there. The project has hit delay after delay. Every promised delivery date has come and gone. The Pandora team promised a second round of credit card orders. I never got that e-mail, but about a thousand people did. That round of pre-orders has also now been canceled. No word if people lost even more money on this round of refunds, although anyone who used American Express appears to have had their funds frozen.

Both rounds of refunds are a result of credit card companies getting nervous about a team of half a dozen or so people taking in somewhere around a million dollars worth of credit card payments ($330 x 4,000 units = $1.3 million dollars) with no product to deliver — frankly, with a growing list of delays and excuses, it’s making me nervous too. According to the most recent thread about the Pandora, “credit cards will no longer be accepted for pre-orders.” If you want one, you need to do a bank transfer and wire the team cash. There is a point where common sense speaks louder than the desire to own something and I think I just crossed it. The Pandora sounds like a super neat gadget; it also sounds like a super disorganized group of folks trying to put it together. “If you want to pay with a credit card, I guess you’ll just have to wait for the second batch,” the thread states. I couldn’t have said it better myself; that’s exactly what I intend to do.

The primary gripe from fanboys is, “if you trust the Pandora team you would just wire them the money.” My favorite response was one that said, “if there is so much trust involved, how about they send us the Pandoras and then we’ll pay for them?”

I already have a Nintendo DS and a Game Boy Advance for playing games and an mp3 player for listening to music. The two things I was looking forward to were the emulators and the ability to read eBooks. I am currently looking at the next wave of netbooks (small laptops), some of which may be hitting the market this spring at a price of $199. If that’s the case, that’ll meet both my needs at half the price. It may not have the small footprint of the Pandora, but if it physically materializes, that’ll certainly give it the immediate advantage.