by onpon4 » 28 Jun 2014, 14:20
I have a Pandora (the original model that they label "classic"). It's a small computer with a keyboard (though it isn't a very good one) and some gaming controls. The base install becomes a completely free system if you remove the wireless (WiFi and Bluetooth) firmware and the OpenGL ES library; of course, built-in wireless and 3-D acceleration don't work in this case (I don't know about 2-D hardware acceleration).
The purpose of the Pandora is kind of sketchy, though. I was in that community for a long time, and while "open source" is supposedly liked, it's not a very important factor to the members there. Obviously, they up-front champion it as a device for emulation to play old proprietary software games, sometimes with even proprietary emulators (like MAME and the Nintendo DS), but even excluding that, there are a lot of proprietary games in the OpenPandora app store (which they call the "repo") that the community around it appreciate greatly. I once did a count of the top 100 rated apps and found a large percentage of them (I want to say 25%) were proprietary. If anything, the OpenPandora actually more of an "indie and retro games" system, than an "open source games" system.
I don't know much of anything about the Pyra. I wouldn't expect it to be much if at all better on the hardware freedom front; part of the problem is simply limited options for ARM SoCs, from my understanding. I wouldn't expect it or its community to become more of a champion of "open source" or freedom, either. Basically, I expect the Pyra to be the same as the OpenPandora, but better on the practical convenience front. I'd recommend it over an iThing, a 3DS, or even pretty much any Android device if you want a small computer to play games with, but I don't think it's worth paying any particular attention to in general.
Another similar device, which as far as I know is about the same in terms of its mission and freedom-respect as the OpenPandora and Pyra, is the GCW Zero. The OpenPandora is really the spiritual successor to the GP2X, while the GCW Zero is more of a spiritual successor to the Dingoo A320.