While it was tempting to grace this post with a picture of blue-skinned aliens, I’m actually talking about a quite different Pandora than the one depicted in James Cameron’s Avatar (though the humans in that movie did use electronic tablets for data display, complete with a very nice user interface for syncing where the image was simply slid off of the desktop and onto a tablet a la Minority Report).
After residing in Development Hell for some time, it appears the Pandora open-source Linux-powered hand-held game console is nearly ready to ship. The device will have a 4.3” 800×480 touchscreen LCD, an ARM CPU, dual SDHC card slots for up to 64 gigs total storage, and battery life estimated to start at 10 hours for gaming and video and to go up to 100 for listening to music. The price will be $330.
I wonder if it will run FBReader? The screen is larger and higher resolution than an iPhone’s, so it might make a decent reader for viewing DRM-free e-books. The miniature-laptop-like form factor might be a problem—but then again, the device will be light enough that it might simply be easiest to hold it sideways like a book, perhaps with the keyboard keys under the left or right thumb mapped to page up and page down.
Of course, there are already a lot of other alternatives for e-book reading that have better form factors and lower prices, so it is doubtful anyone will buy a Pandora solely for the purpose of reading e-books on it. But the potential is there for any device that can have applications installed on it to display e-books as an additional function.
Photo credit: Michael Mrozak, used under Creative Commons Attribution license.
