What would happen if a forum of techies decided to crowdsource the ultimate handheld gaming/computing system, running open source software and powerful enough to play nearly any game anyone cares about in emulation?  Then you would get the Pandora handheld.  The specs:

  • ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
  • 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
  • PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
  • 800×480 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

Screw getting a netbook.  I want one of these.  The first batch is sold out, and there is still design work being done, but the organizers claim to be on schedule to ship this year.  If this product ever fully condensces out of the vaporware, one will be mine.  It is necessary.