M$ is about to introduce new handheld gadgets named SideShow. A SideShow device will cost between $80 and $150 with touch screen, bluetooth, built-in batter, Qwerty keyboard, 32bit ARM CPU, and 4GB memory.

I'm wondering how much profit GPH makes out of each GP2X console soled?!

This will likely have a weak CPU, and its controls plain suck for gaming (what controls? ). Not to mention it will probably be closed to hobbyist developers.

The one with the QWERTY slide-out will be $150, remember that. The $80 model will have a small 3.5" touch screen.

How can you say much about it when you know almost none of the specs? The $80 version looks pretty low resolution, and probably doesn't have a lot of memory or CPU speed.

80 Mhz ARM7 CPU...

Not to mention to M$ money isn't a concern. They could give them away, they probably would love to give them away to get the market share.

Of course they can't due to all the old unfair competition laws. So they will sell them way below cost instead.

Typical ARM9-cpu boards with similiar clocking like the gp2x with a little periphery added are to be bought for the same price (sub $100).. of course they are shipped without case, lcd, buttons. Sometimes they come with network hubs, usb and serial ports instead of.

I'm still looking for technical specs but it seems the cpu is somewhat weak.

So m$ now tries their hand in the handheld market as a hardware vendor too. Let's see what its impact is.

Even the $150 version is cheaper than GP2X! As for the controls, it is just a design decision, it wont add to cost. I'm talking material cost, of course.

I think GPH needs competitor(s). Linux game consoles can be mainstream and in hands of many kids.

Thanks. Up to 80MHz ARM7, maybe that just means that it's variable clock rate, but even at 80MHz that's not a lot. And the $80 version is probably only 176x220 (the display definitely looked both low resolution and non-square to me), which isn't any good.

Ok, substitute that with BT, touch screen, large memory etc. which GP2X does not have.

Its apparent that the GP2x can't win a peripherals war. Thats a design drawback probably made to make a possible new model very attractive.

Yet its competency to have all necessary components as a fine gaming device outclasses this hearthless gadget. The sideshow has no real purpose so to speak. I'm not sure what it could be cabable of anyways.

There are not that many 2X's, so the cost of production will be much higher... Plus Cum$oft will use their windose monopoly to finance it - they'll not need to turn a profit like the GP2X has too, it'll just need to cut off the competitions oxygen supply (read revenue)...

Do users ever win with Cum$oft 'products' anyway? Better to pay more and keep Ballmer's sweaty palms off your shoulders while you code if you ask me...

As someone else pointed out a small company like GPH doesn't have th buying power of M$ so components will be more costly, not to mention that I'm sure It will be subsidised by M$ as well. Besides that the two gadget are poles apart so a fair price comparrison isn't possible.

As for GPH needing more competition I think that would be bad for the community. A gaming device like the 2x is a fairly niche item and to add a direct competitor would most likely divide the community and result in one of the companies going bankrupt.

As for whether linux based consoles can be mainstream, of course they can. But not a console like the GP2X. It would need to compete with the likes of nintendo and sony and require a huge catalogue of games. And you can bet that if this was the case it would be tightly locked down so that there would be no open source development and would in reality be no different to any of the other consoles out there. Mainstream isn't always better, personally I like to be different.

Leaving all that aside, I find the design plain ugly, it also looks uncomfortable

i would not say that the gp2x and the sideshow are or will be competitors becuase the sideshow looks like more of a pda design with its touch screen and bluetooth technology wheras the gp2x is built for media and games.

Sideshow is just an extension to get more use out of Vista. It's literally like that syncing screen that you can attach to read emails etc off vista when the pc isn't on.

I'd like you to make a gp2x for less than gph sell it for. Prices are always based on mass production quantities. Sell 10 and cost would probably be $5000 each, if not more.

Face it, the gp2x is a niche product - it's not exactly something that will sell thousands every single week like some of the other consoles when they came out.

It's the same with everything. At work we buy full development kits and then throw away everything apart from the jtag programmer, simply because it's cheaper to buy the dev kit, than the jtag equipment on it's own (due to the dev kit company buying the programmers in bulk). Do it with lots of other stuff too (for example, a small division wants an internal file/web server - we buy them an xbox as it's cheaper than a full blown pc and does exactly the same job)

Zune, and now this.

Honestly, I sorta wish MS would stop beating around the bush and release their portable game offering already. I'm sure their game division has had it in mind for awhile.

I didn't really like the Xbox first generation when it came out. I don't have a 360 but I admire its capabilities and microsofts willpower to make it succeed. Having SOTN on a console automatically gives it points in my book.

Thing is, with all this, Microsoft really has some nice advantages to taking the portable market if they wanted to.

The DS is great but can you imagine an affordable gaming handheld with a touchscreen and Windows Mobile built in?

I'm sure Microsoft knows this as well, so I wonder what has held them back for so long. And I'm sure they salivate at the connectivity between the 360 and such a device.

It would push both Windows Mobile and their gaming initiative at once.

That said, it'd still take alot for them to convince me to buy one.

Not much. M$, on the other hand, will likely make a loss on the sale of that thing, compared to manufacturing cost. Just as with the XB and XB360. However, for M$, the important thing is to establish a platform for software sales and downloadable content - Just as with the xboxen, the real money to be had is from payed-for downloads and must-have programs. Software/information can be sold many times for a more or less single investment in manufacture. There's the profit. You won't find M$ touting that things ability to run homebrew softs...

GBH don't have the luxury of pushing up the price of the GP2x software, so they'll just have to stick to trying to recuperate the manufacturing costs on hardware sales.

Wow, the sideshow looks horrible. The $80 one is way too small to be even a passable PDA let alone a gaming device. The $150 one looks like a crappy PDA phone. I use an old Sony Clie NR70V for my PDA and a GP2X FE for my gaming and would rather be whipped nude with an entire rose bush than trade either.

This is what I am more interested in. Hopefully a cheap ePaper reader that is distributed world wide.

Edit: Just read a small article on it, it looks like it is tied to Vista ¬¬

Interesting. I wonder what way MS will try to enter the handheld market one day - the Wii has already doomed the gamepad, which is way past it's prime.

Does anyone remember the original NES gamepads? Advertising always had kids putting them on the floor and using them. They were small as to be cheap - no one realized kids would - pick them up. Then as gamepads got more complicated, no one bothered to use any fingers other than our thumbs and pointer fingers (in the back). And FPS with your thumbs? Geez that was technology waiting to be replaced by something better.

So as to new handhelds - it will be cost / software / what it brings to the table. DS has a stylus and two screens. PSP has ... a widescreen, a Dpad, and ghosting. GP2X has emulators (at 2 commercial games we can't say it has that).

You can't really use motion controls with a handheld - "Whee I can't see the screen!" Probably a stylus.

4GB of flash memory, with a 80Mhz CPU is like having a school bus with a motorcycle engine. Yeah, you can get lots of people inside, that's cool. It's nice to open 200 adobe acrobat readers at the same time without having to close them. Let alone that vista is probably going to suck 79.99Mhz.

And, it looks horrid, and it's still in beta. Can ANYONE actually play with that thing? What the hell happened to Zune? That thing is horrible and I would better stick with a Palm or pocket PC than that terribly designed PDA.

And, the first model which has something useful is $150, that's almost like the GP2X. And the GP2X:

- Has 200Mhz
- Has enough RAM for many, many uses
- Looks pretty
- Won't need windows updates each 5 minutes,
- won't crash
- won't scream VISTA all around
- won't waste 99% of your resources
- won't scream VISTA all around
- won't scream VISTA all around

But wait! There's a screenshot of solitaire! It'll be nice if they could upload a genesis, NES, MAME, NeoGeo (etc. etc. etc.) screenshot instead!

I hardly get pissed of, but this kind of topics really make me wanna cry.

Banzai GP2X!

Check this thing out. Goes for $40.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.827

We have one of those too! It plays pirate NES games. (With pirate, I mean remakes of games with weird music and strange sprites, such as those 500-in-1 NES games)

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the display looks like playing the actual NES back in 1988 with an RF cable. I'm not kidding, just in case.

Please notice than I'm comparing "bills of materials" for SideShow and GP2X, not the devices themselves!!

It's an unfair comparison, that's my opinion. It's like saying how come a dell costs $1000 and a refurbished Pentium III costs $300. At least that's what the topic suggests.

Anyway, it's just my POV about the sideview. Maybe it'll be a complete success, maybe it will suck. Who knows! But I don't think it will have any effect, either positive or negative for the GP2X. Two completely different markets.

A little off-topic, but someone mentioned about trying to get GP2X mainstream "in the hands of kids". Something to that effect.

Good Lord no. Do you really want that to happen? I'm fairly happy with GP2X being very niche as Squidge said, because more people using the device means more stupid people use the device. Have you ever read (or tried to read) a PSP or more recently DS message board? That's what happens when your device goes mainstream in the hands of kids. It really makes you wish the sun would go nova.

Dude, i don't think that the 4GB is RAM. It's just memory for storage.

I mostly agree, being a kid myself.
Many of the psp/ds forums are flooded with questions on "howz duz i get teh romz?"
The gp2x doesn't seem to have this problem, luckily. Besides many kids these days would rather have their parents give them $40 so they can buy a game and stick it in instead of doing the small, slightly educational, task of setting up homebrew. Also I can't tell you how many friends I have who beg me to load their psp's with roms and set up the emulators, but I refuse and tell them that they need to learn it for themselves.

That is the main problem with promoting the GP2X to others: It is not plug-and-play like the PSP and Gameboys are. People see mine and want to get one and I tell them that the GP2X is more like a computer than a PSP. Many people can’t even install software on their PCs using installers, don’t understand file systems, and can’t be bothered learning how to configure each different emulator’s controls and other settings. The GP2X is a wonderful tool for those who at least could understand and manually setup a few emulators on their desktop computer. Unless someone shows the capacity to want to learn [RTFM] to do these things I don’t recommend it.

It looks like an Iphone, without the phone stuff. Whee!

A reverse N-Gage?

Slideshow.... 3rd rate knockoff of those amazing looking e-dictionaries the Koreans / Japanese / Chinese always seem to have (http://handhelds.engadget.com/tag/e-dictionary/).

I'd love to see something like this (http://www.engadget.com/tag/d5/) ; but with a D-pad on the left.