Gizmondo is 770 competitor inly by a stretch of imagination, but nevertheless they also try to sell a handheld that supports wireless. CNN runs a pretty negative story on Gizmondo:
Two years ago, Nokia introduced the N-Gage, which quickly became viewed (by the community, if not the industry) as one of the worst hardware launches in gaming history. Hold on to your hats, folks: Here we go again.
Gizmondo is probably not actually a serious company. Their last report was full of peculiar financial transactions (for example the company director paid an independent development company he owned millions for a game that Gizmondo had already developed in-house). It’s possible this is all just some scheme to make the directors rich even if the whole thing flops.
On N-gage, I love my N-gage QD (no sidetalking, hotswap card slot etc) and the games since 2004 are really excellent (Pathway To Glory got 90s and 80s from every single review site), but I have to agree the launch was really badly handled. The advertising was especially bad, it ignored the smartphone functions (indeed the phone functions entirely!) and just concentrated on the games, but the launch games were terrible. If Nokia had waited 6 or 12 months, advertised it as the smartphone that it is (it’s a standard Symbian S60) and launched with stuff like Pathway To Glory, Pocket Kingdom, Elder Scrolls Shadowkey etc they’d have probably had a fairly respectful reception.
Comment by kris 10.22.05 @ 4:37 am