CNET Unwraps the Gizmondo

[Darius Wey]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.cnet.com/4520-10602_1-5619086.html?tag=nl.e404' target='_blank'>http://www.cnet.com/4520-10602_1-56...tml?tag=nl.e404</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Gizmondo has taken the wraps off an eponymous portable gaming device that's a Swiss Army Knife among handheld consoles. In addition to being an on-the-go gaming platform, the Gizmondo delivers wireless text messaging and e-mail, GPS capabilities, a digital camera, and a portable video player."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/wey-20050115-Gizmondo.gif" /><br /><br />The gadget folk at CNET had a look at the Gizmondo during CES. Interestingly, the one they played around with didn't have those obscure wavy and dotty buttons that was seen in <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=35925">this post</a>. Its hardware outfit is some serious swag, and is sure to provide some decent competition against the PSP and Nintendo DS. Have a read of the CNET column and let us know what you think. Are any of you considering the purchase? ;-)

[JonnoB]

I liked the buttons. Most have XYAB or color buttons. Rather than copy, use the symbols for the four elements (earth wind fire water). It looks cool!

[Sydney Bristow]

It seems to be a great device, except for the 3.5 hours battery life. :cry:

I also think that these buttons look a lot better than the wavy ones. :)

[Vincent M Ferrari]

I saw it at the Nvidia booth at the show and it looked pretty cool. But with the Nintendo DS out and the PSP to be released shortly, I'm gonna hold off and see how things shake out.

Definitely an impressive little machine, though.

(And incidentally, the one at the Nvidia booth did have the wavy buttons)

[Peter Traugot]

I love new technoogy, and love the efforts of the entrepreneur. I've been in the game biz for 13 years and worked to release a platform. Here is the bottom line. . .

If EA doesn't support it. It's dead before it hits the streets.

Pitty, really.

The only chance it has beyond that is if it is picked up by a large niche group and has a strong underground for support. That's what kept platforms like the Amiga alive for so many years after it's effective edge wore off.

[personman]

Put a 20-40 GB hard drive in there an it would look a lot better. I don't think I'll be getting a convergent device like this unless it has more storage than what's out there today. When flash memory gets bigger than 20 GB or hard drives get cheaper and smaller, then we'll see some really useful devices.

[Peter Traugot]

O.K., so I will now remove my foot from my mouth. . .

Seems EA DOES have a deal.

O.K. then.

Pretty cool.

The battery life is a bit of a sticking point though, I must aggree with that.

[NLS]

I don't like it BUT I expect it to push near future PDA to have more multimedia capabilities (unless they come from HP, that live in their own world)

[surur]

Put a 20-40 GB hard drive in there an it would look a lot better. I don't think I'll be getting a convergent device like this unless it has more storage than what's out there today. When flash memory gets bigger than 20 GB or hard drives get cheaper and smaller, then we'll see some really useful devices.

May I drag out my old pocketpc media player mock-up again? Funny, it looks suspiciously similar to this device :lol:

http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/media/users/4259/withcover.jpg

Surur

[dean_shan]

With the price of $400 this is going to become a niche market device. There is no way they can compete with Nintendo and Sony when the Gizmodo is more then twice the price.

[sub_tex]

There is no way they can compete with Nintendo and Sony when the Gizmodo is more then twice the price.

Exactly.

Personally I think it looks very dated already. Like a system design from the 90s.

Put this next to a PSP and it will gather dust.

[zybler]

There is no way they can compete with Nintendo and Sony when the Gizmodo is more then twice the price.

Exactly.

Personally I think it looks very dated already. Like a system design from the 90s.

Put this next to a PSP and it will gather dust.
My point exactly... what's up with the tiny screen? Jack of all trades is master of none... I'll give this a miss.

[jeffmd]

the gizmondo dosnt look nearly as slick as the psp, and imo no one can compete with a massive strage based system. Games can look so much better when you have the ability to store large games. And i'm not just talking about movies. Animation, backgrounds (none of the PS final fantasy games could have exhisted outside the cd format with its immense collection of pre rendered backgrounds). The PSP is the only one in position to recreate any kind of console feeling.

Infact the giz looks alot like the 2nd ngage ^^

[Fishie]

and imo no one can compete with a massive strage based system. Games can look so much better when you have the ability to store large games. And i'm not just talking about movies. Animation, backgrounds (none of the PS final fantasy games could have exhisted outside the cd format with its immense collection of pre rendered backgrounds). The PSP is the only one in position to recreate any kind of console feeling.

Must be why both Dragonquest7 as well as Final Fantasy 7 are available for cellphones in Japan.

Oh BTW the PSP is stuck at less then 1.5 gigs a disc.
In theory along the road a Nintendo DS game could surpass that size(currently the rom sizes for DS are up to 1 gigabit which is far less then the 12 gigabits of PSP, this wont remain the case though).

[x999x]

the gizmondo dosnt look nearly as slick as the psp, and imo no one can compete with a massive strage based system. Games can look so much better when you have the ability to store large games. And i'm not just talking about movies. Animation, backgrounds (none of the PS final fantasy games could have exhisted outside the cd format with its immense collection of pre rendered backgrounds). The PSP is the only one in position to recreate any kind of console feeling.

Infact the giz looks alot like the 2nd ngage ^^

So by your reasoning, Final Fantasy 1-6 and any of the Dragon Quest games did little to offer gamers a lush environment or enhance their story telling because it was on a catridge based system.

Storage has little to do with what makes a good game, some of the industry's biggest franchises comprise less storage space than an 8 meg CF card...

I'm not harping on you, but I just found that statement to be a little devoid of the other contributing factors that make games good. I do see your point, and can agree to an extent, I just feel that storage is less a factor than the gameplay engine that's holding everything together.

Back on subject, this device is doomed to fail miserably. Battery Life > Horse Power. Atari found this out, and so did Sega, while Nintendo stuck to it's guns on adhering to a standard that sacrificed horsepower to conserve energy. Sony is learning this with their pathetic battery life of 90 minutes with full features on the PSP. Sony on the other hand at least have a bevy of quality third party developers, while Giz has only EA. Sure EA is great if you'd like to play the same game you have been for the passed 5 years, be it sport, sim, or driving, but they're not Square, Capcom or Namco, all of which continue to pump out the hits, and bring innovation to the table.

That said, there's only room for two portable gaming systems in this war of the handhelds, and they're made by Sony and Nintendo. Whoever wins, we benefit, the gamers.

[x999x]

Oh BTW the PSP is stuck at less then 1.5 gigs a disc.
In theory along the road a Nintendo DS game could surpass that size(currently the rom sizes for DS are up to 1 gigabit which is far less then the 12 gigabits of PSP, this wont remain the case though).

Good point, they're using that flash rom technology (for its games) that's stacked on top of itself, and can only be written to once. I believe this technology was featured here as a news tidbit mid-last year.

Something else to throw onto the fire is the fact that the DS also has a second expansion slot for GBA games, of which has direct access to both the arm 7 and arm 9 cpu's the DS uses. This opens a world of possibilities not available to the PSP or Gizmondo, whereby the DS can expand upon it's hardware without losing it's formfactor, and can be done safely by the end user.

[jeffmd]

Fish, you're kidding right? Those are as much of a port of the real game as everquest was on the pocket pc! And I allways heard the umd disc were 1.5 gigabytes, not bits. Especialy since they are sticking full length movies on it. 1.5 gigabit disc would not produce quality movies even in mpeg4 (And im pretty sure they are using mpeg2 for non-game movies). That would put it well out of reach of the DS. I also don't see the DS doing anything special, the large GBA games are 12 megabytes. Considering large SNES games are around 4, that's a pretty slow and steady growth for selling caretirdges affordably. If game makers tried to push that up significantly, it would eat into their profits considerably. Oh and someone tried this once, their name was SNK. No the world was not ready for a kick ass console whos games cost $200 because of their 2 and 300mbit games.

x99x, to answer your first question.. YES. Space was the main reason they couldnt offer varried scenery, unique tiles, high(er) quality music, and animation. Obvisouly the hardware is the 2nd biggest factor, but if you added a cdrom to the SNES, you could support digitized pre rendered backgrounds (the SNES has the color pallet) and fully streamed audio (8 full digital voices, each able to stream a single channel wave). Not sure if it was able to do 16bit, it heavily relied on a hardware compression which I think worked on 8 bits only.

Storage has little to do with what makes a good game, some of the industry's biggest franchises comprise less storage space than an 8 meg CF card...

Whats this mean? Even the smallest ps1 games still exceeded 8 megs , especialy since first generation games that didn't use much in the way of varied textures and motion video, still used streamed audio.

edit: did the board just censor my butt with doller signs? whoa...

[Fishie]

I do think youhave a comprehension problem as I clearly said the following: currently the rom sizes for DS are up to 1 gigabit which is far less then the 12 gigabits of PSP

I know the ins and outs of these systems, I regularly talk with the people who make the highest profile games for these things.
The PSP is a beast but it does have weakneses and plenty of em.

[Kati Compton]

I do think youhave a comprehension problem as I clearly said the following: currently the rom sizes for DS are up to 1 gigabit which is far less then the 12 gigabits of PSP
Please keep the conversation on a more friendly level, Fishie. No insults.

[jeffmd]

Fish, well while I don't have any direct evidence (and neither do you) on the size of current carts untill I see them dumped, metroid demo which is the only one to be dumped so far (mario and sonic dumps are fake) is only 16 megs. Now i do understand that this is a demo, but it also contains a teaser trailer movie (2 files actually, looking at their file names it looks like they both play at the same time on both screens. ) that won't be in the original. Infact the demo seems to have quite a few movies, but then I really don't doubt metroid will be one of the largest DS roms at the time when it is finally released. But movies are bloat, especialy for a cartiridge, and I dont think mario or any of the other carts avail atm have as much pre rendered movies in them, so they could just as concievably be the same size as metroid. All speculation of course.

How ever you also need to look at the economic side of things. GBA carts are the size that they are because it is an acceptable cost factor in their profit margins. The GBA can be just as big and do movies and streamed sound just as well as the DS, but it dosnt because the size of the gameboy cart (and ds and gba do share the same cart) can't spiral out of control. If you suddenly jumped from 12 megs to 125 megs.. your cost would go through the roof. And before you go looking at the cost of flash cards for reasoning, remember they are just selling a flash card. Game makers are selling the card AND the game. And considering game makers are used to selling a $50 game on a 50 cent dvd or cd, you can imagin the shifts they must endure when a $30 gba game cost a couple bucks for the cartridge. (well, unless 12mbyte rom carts do cost pennys when mass produced. ^^ still there would be a huge cost difference if they were 120 megbyte carts mass produced)

The PSP's only drawback ive seen is battery life, but if you buy a second battery you should be set for life, they arnt that big. Load times might annoy some, but weve lived with load times for years now, ps1, ps2, xbox, gamecube, dreamcast, 3d0.. and so on. One nice thing the psp has going for it in this asspect is that it isn't loading nearly as many textures and polygons as current consoles, so aside from first generation game offendors, the psp's load times should become a non factor soon enough.

[Fishie]

The carts indeed cost pennies to make and yes they are cheaper then having Sony press a UMD to third parties.
GBA carts cost a lot more and use different technology, the only reason the DS has a GBA slot and a second processor is to ensure compatibility with GBA games(the entire backwards compatible thing).

Its two completely different systems with different aims.
The DS is a cheap sturdy system with moderate capabilities while Sony set out to put a home console/media device in your pocket and then cheapened out.

The DS and PSP are battling for the same dollars yes but they are not in direct competition.
For that Nintendo is developing a new Gameboy device.

[ChristopherTD]

Battery life and quality of software will be key factors in the success of the Gizmondo device.

The DS and PSP will get quality software because of Nintendo/Sony pulling power and the potential size of the market. Gizmondo may struggle to get developers to write software that people will pay $40 (or more) for.

For gaming on the go, the DS is sweet. Simply close the lid, it goes to sleep and the screens are protected. Open it up again when you want to resume and away you go. The battery drain when sleeping is very low. Alas, this only works for DS titles, when playing GBA games it carrys on running. I have yet to run the battery down even in a heavy day of use.

I am not convinced that convergence is the way to go for mobile gaming. I could almost manage to see iPod, PPC and cellphone in one device but I think physical form factor becomes a restriction for gaming, the requirements are very different.

[koriel]

What a lot of people seem to be missing about the Gizmondo is that it is NOT designed to compete against the DS and PSP (shock, horror!).

The original idea was a GPS system that would alert parents if their child strayed outside a certain area. The game-playing functionality evolved as a means of ensuring that kids would actually bother to carry the system around with them. The original functionality is still in there, you can define an area and have the system send a text message if it leaves a certain area. (Hmmm, wonder if you could get a stolen PSP to phone home?) :D

It also has GPS route-finding and text messaging built into the system. All of the above are things that (at the moment) cannot be done on either a DS or a PSP. This is a system that could potentially save my child's life and you are damn right that is worth $400.

[ChristopherTD]

It may not be designed to compete with DS/PSP, indeed they didn't exist till very recently. At the time it was conceived the GBA ruled the handheld roost.

However, things are more complicated now which will make it harder for Gizmondo to sell units to gamers. One part of the target Gizmondo market that has got tougher.

For GPS/SMS use it is not competing with DS/PSP, though giving a child a $400 piece of desirable kit may just tell you when the mugger has left your child's area! :)

[Vincent M Ferrari]

It's not designed to compete with the DS and PSP, but let's face it: People will look at it in one of two ways:

1. A game system; in which case the DS, PSP, and GBA are going to wipe the damned floor with it because it costs half as much and will undoubtedly have triple the game support.

2. A PDA, in which case it'll lose to the Pocket PC and Palm handhelds because most people who want a PDA are not looking for a device that looks like a game device. Don't believe me? Ask the folks at Tapwave how well the Zodiac is doing, and then compare that to other handhelds from HP, etc.


Regardless of the design, it will have to compete with either PDA's or gaming handhelds. To adapt a phrase from Fishie, they may not be competing directly by design, but they are definitely competing for the same dollars.

I don't see the Gizmondo doing particularly well. It has potential, but it first has to find a market to fit into. It doesn't quite fit into the PDA market because most people who would want a PDA wouldn't really be interested in a PDA that looks like a gameboy. It doesn't fit into the gaming handheld market because it's too expensive and may or may not have the game support of other gaming handhelds. It's not an enticing media device because there are tons of those on the market already.

I wish these guys well, but I just don't see a major run on the Gizmondo the day it hits the market.

[Phillip Dyson]

One of the facts that comes to mind for me is Microsoft's gaming strategy.

The next generation of directx (xna?) is supposed to allow game developers to be able to develope games for multiple microsoft platforms at once.

PC Games
Xbox
And I would be shocked if it did not include CE based platforms as well.

Granted, the Gizmondo maybe a bit premature, and of course M$ may never even implement this bold new world, but if so, I believe that CE will be able to make a dangerous showing in the gaming market.

If you want to talk about development costs. What will developers do when they can develop a single game for such a huge market.

If M$ is smart, they will have the API handle the various hardware differences.

IMHO

[TheZodiac]

I will definately get one. Al services combined - I wouldnt need to carry them seperate (obviously) and I am the type to use them all equally, because I need them equally :)