Can Nintendo’s DSi stand up to Pandora’s Box?

So Nintendo finally confirmed their latest model of the Nintendo DS will be launched in Spring time. The Nintendo DSi will be the third generation DS to hit the market in four years. They’ve definitely been doing something right.

But can Nintendo keep a hold of the handheld market, when the highly anticipated Pandora will also be released this year. In their own words, Pandora “is by far the most powerful handheld in the world both in terms of raw CPU power and 3D graphics capability, it will be able to handle things such as Firefox3 or Quake3 with ease.”

Of course power doesn’t always lead to popularity. While hardcore gamers may love the opportunity to play more intense games on their handheld, the casual gamer will be looking at one thing; brand name. And nobody can touch Nintendo when it comes to their brand.

The Pandora is not only extremely powerful, but it’s also completely Open Source, and not to mention very sexy! It’s probably what you’d get if you crossed a Nintendo DS with a Sony PSP and a dash of Asus Eee PC.

OpenPandora

This little baby has everything but the kitchen sink: TV Out, Wifi, Bluetooth, two SD slots and 10 hours battery life. Not to mention a full QWERTY keyboard, for e-mail on the go.

The Pandora will be on sale around 30th September in the UK, USA, Canada, Germany and Turkey. At under £200, you know we’ll definitely be getting at least one for the Sporkings office.

So for now, we’ll just tease you with some 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

Of course as sexy as this little device is, you can have the best console in the world, but if you dont have the games, its just a ps3 pretty box. Saying that, even if the big games studios don’t jump on Pandora, we’ll still have a great little mini-pc for emails, browsing and playing emulated games (old skool are the best, after all). If the netbook is a sub-notebook, then Pandora is a sub-netbook.