Hasta La Gadget!

Two years ago this month, the open-source Pandora handheld missed its first ship date. To their credit, the GP2X community had a working dev board, but the handheld’s DS Lite-like case was nowhere to be found, and things have generally progressed at a glacial pace ever since. However, in February, a spark of hope arrived in the form of dev units, and this week, it appears the last lingering snags are finally being undone. The above image is a pair of honest-to-goodness mass produced Pandoras with painted, hopefully final cases; and at the official Pandora blog, the team reports that it now has fully functioning drivers for every component, has resumed production on the mainboards, and intends to ship both cases and boards to the UK soon for final assembly. Everything seems to be finally coming together. At this point, it would take a disaster of biblical proportions — say, a volcanic eruption — to stop Pandora buyers from lifting lids later this year.

[Thanks, Andy]

Pandora handheld looking less like vaporware with each passing day originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Apr 2010 02:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There aren’t many mass production options on the market when it comes to glasses-less 3D displays for Nintendo’s forthcoming 3DS handheld gaming console. And according to early leaks from Japan, the special Nintendo 3DS display is supposedly built by Hitachi and Sharp using a parallax barrier system. So guess where this new 3.4-inch, 480 x 854 pixel display is likely headed? While Sharp doesn’t say for sure, it’s a good bet that this parallax barrier 3D LCD will be fronting the user interface on the 3DS. Unlike the 3D displays you’ll find in modern 3D HDTVs requiring the viewer to wear active or passive glasses, Sharp’s display uses a parallax barrier system to create a sense of depth by using a series of vertical slits in an ordinary LCD to direct light to the right and left eyes. The panel offers a 500nit brightness, 1,000:1 contrast, and is available with or without a touchscreen. A non-touchscreen version of the display goes into mass production before June but there’s no specific mention of the touchscreen timeline (but we imagine it won’t be far behind). In other words, we could have a Nintendo 3DS on the market before the holidays. Just saying. Guess we’ll find out for sure at E3 in June.

Update: Akihabara News went eyes-on with the display and came away impressed with the colors and brightness. Better yet, it says, “Sharp succeed to do what Sony and Panasonic does with 3D Glasses!” Well, that sounds hopeful.

Nintendo 3DS to feature 3.4-inch Sharp parallax barrier display? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Apr 2010 01:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since Nintendo first asserted sole domination over the handheld gaming market with the release of the paperback-sized Game Boy in 1989, the company has striven time and again to make its pocket systems smaller, meeting fantastic financial success along the way. Nintendo did it with the Game Boy Pocket, the Advance SP, the Micro, the DS Lite and again ever so slightly with the DSi — the last even at the expense of backwards compatibility and battery life. Now, for the first time in the company’s history, it’s made an existing platform bigger, with questionable reasons as to why. Does the Nintendo DSi XL squash its predecessors flat? Or is Nintendo compensating for something? Find out inside.

Continue reading Nintendo DSi XL review

Nintendo DSi XL review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You had the hard news for breakfast, so how’s about some less official, but still pretty robust, fodder for brunch? Asahi in Japan offers the first word on how the 3DS achieves its 3D-ness by suggesting that the new portable game machine with feature a parallax barrier LCD from Sharp. The tech has apparently already been deployed in a few cellphones over there and is described as “unsuitable” for large-screen TVs. This is corroborated by Nikkei, which suggests that the screens on the new device will be smaller than 4 inches diagonally, placing it closer to the DSi than the 4.2-inch DSi XL / LL. Other news from the latter source include so-called 3D control stick(s), though it’s not entirely clear whether this’ll be anything massively new or just a pair of analog nubs for us to push around. Either way, Nintendo is said to have secured patents for the new control methodology in Japan late last year. The Nikkei article also mentions improvements in WiFi transfers and battery life, as well as a new vibration function. Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, can someone please tell us if this thing has Tegra inside or not?

Nintendo 3DS to come with ‘3D control stick,’ vibration, and Sharp’s parallax barrier 3D LCD? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s a global gaming company to do once they’ve soundly dominated the portable market? Why, covertly get the DS into schools and restaurants, of course! Shigeru Miyamoto, who created undercover gems like Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda, recently informed the AP that his company would be rolling the DS out “in junior high and elementary schools in Japan starting in the new school year,” though few details beyond that were available. We do know, however, that this invasion into the education sector is more than just a fluke, with Miyamoto noting that this very area is where he is “devoting [himself] the most.” Of course, the Big N already has a nice stable of mind-bending titles, but getting actual teachers to embrace the device in the classroom would be another thing entirely. In related news, select McDonald’s eateries in Japan will be using the DS to train part-time workers, though mum’s the word on whether the Cooking Mama franchise will be cashing in here.

Nintendo slipping DS handhelds into schools, McDonald’s training sessions originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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