The DragonBox Pyra Moves Closer As OpenPandora Successor

Michael Mozrek gave a presentation recently about his work as the project lead on the DragonBox Pyra, the slated replacement to the Open Pandora handheld Linux game system.

The Pyra handheld is going to overcome earlier limitations of the OpenPandora such as its slow hardware (by today's standards), lack of HDMI, etc. The Pyra will feature a microSD port and up to 32GB of internal storage, the OMAP5 SoC is expected to be used for this device, a standard HDMI port will be integrated, and a docking station is planned.

The Pyra will feature a five-inch screen but it's "not being needed" and being too demanding on the CPU. With the two planned USB ports on the Pyra, one is combining an eSATA port for external disk connectivity.

Pyra is planned to run with a full Debian ARM distribution and full OpenGL (rather than just GLES) support is expected. The Pyra at least initially won't be free of binary blobs but all of the kernel modules should be open-source. The price and ship date aren't yet set in stone, but chances are the DragonBox Pyra will ship in 2015 for somewhere around 500 EUR. At least 1,000 pre-orders will be needed to start production in Germany.

More information on the DragonBox Pyra can be found via Mozrek's video embedded below and more information from the Pandora Live Blog.