How did this system come to be?
A few years ago, we (Craig, Fatih and EvilDragon) had the idea of creating an OpenSource Gaming Handheld based on the input of the community.
Thus, the Pandora was born.
Luckily, we found a lot of helpful people at the GP32X.com Boards: Michael Weston, who designed the hardware, Dave Cancillier, who designed the complete case and some top developers like notaz, DJWillis, skeezix, vimacs, Pickle, cpasjuste and Squidge, who worked on the kernel, the drivers, the OS and some software ports.
Little did we know about how to design a handheld back then. How long things can take. how complicated everything is. Therefore, we first thought we can deliver it December 2008, just before christmas. Well, it didn't work out. Not even close.
There were delays. And more delays. And... more delays.
However, we never gave up - and finally, in May 2010, the first units have been delivered to the customers!
While production is still a bit slow, the speed is increasing, so that we expect to have 8000 Pandoras delivered by the end of the year.
How did we cover all the costs?
Designing a device like this and producing it does cost money. A LOT of money. More money than we could've afforded.
And we didn't want to get any investors involved - as that could've killed the open character the unit has.
Therefore, we decided to do it in a rather uncommon way: Whoever wanted to get a unit from the first batch had to pay in advance. A risky thing, considering how many delays we had, mass cancellation could have happened anytime. However, as we reported what was happening behind the scenes all the time, the community did stick with us. And we didn't disappoint them, looking at the reactions from those who already have a unit!
A big thanks once more to all the preorderers - without you, the Pandora would not exist.
