Nintendo had the right idea at the time by promoting a longer battery life and a cheaper price. It's success speaks for itself. Newcomers like the Gizmondo (sorry Dada) pushed the tech envelope, but couldn't find the right balance between gaming and other bells and whistles. You could argue that portables is held back not by technology but by chemistry which limits the energy capacity batteries can hold. Without that bottleneck, the competition would be much wider by including cell phone companies and PDAs into the mix. All they'd need would be a capable and efficient graphics processor and some developement support....
Out of curiosity, how was the battery life for the GameBoy Color? I know the original had like 35 hours (according to Wiki) and the GameBoy Pocket had like 10 hours (also according to Wiki). I'm just wondering how it compares to the Game Gear, the Lynx (or Lynx II more specifically), and a few other handhelds that were released ~8 years sooner; it seems like most of them would last about 5-6 hours (according to Wiki), although I think they may have required more batteries (GameBoy Pocket needed 2, the regular needed 4, and the Lynx needed 6). In fact, now that I'm looking at some of the older handhelds, I'm surprised the WonderSwan Color didn't do better. It came out about 3 months before the GBA in Japan, was ~$35 cheaper (~$65 at launch), had much better battery life (~20 hours on one AA battery compared to 5-10 hours on 2 AA batteries according to Wiki), seemed to have roughly similar graphical capabilities (SNES level from the few screens I can find), and even had support from Square (a couple of Final Fantasy remakes were the biggest hits I believe) and a few other developers (including Bandai, the designers of the system). I wouldn't necessarily have expected it to come close to competing with the GBA, but it seemed to have none of the disadvantages that some of the other handhelds had (mostly poor battery life and a high price tag when compared to the Game Boy line). That's easier said than done.
Even so, look at the DS Lite and 360 with their white color schemes. It's just so blah and doesn't have anything on the psp or my halo limited ed. xbox. Just my opinion, white sux. Not that its hugely important to me.
I think the DS Lites going to Europe are black: Did the white PSPs ever make it to the US? I think they've only been released in Japan and Europe IIRC: I too am a little tired of everything being white. It seems like I'm a fan of black since I like the black DSL, the black PSP (although white is probably better for hiding smudges), the black PS3, and the black Wii. The black 360 devkits looked nice too: Black gets a little overused too though.
Those look pretty nice. And yeah black can get tiring too. I think variety is the key. I liked that the GC and SPs and micros were offered in a variety of styles and colors to meet gamers taste. And I hope that tradition continues. It looks like it is for the Wii. And the faceplates/skins for the 360 just doesn't cut it; you might as well allow the option to change the skin of the entire box, not just the face.
europes release of the ds lite is black. 2-3 million dollar shipment of these black ds lites going through HK went missing [one container full].
Yeah, that might be a stronger possibility. If that one portable media player designed by MS doesn't do this, then maybe they'll make another one similar to it that has the 'Live Anywhere' philosophy. Assuming it has decent-sized HDD, you could download Live Arcade games to it directly and then play them on it (as well as all the other stuff you could do with Live Anywhere). That wouldn't be as interesting though, at least to me.
But the companies like for new colors to be a big deal. Heck, just look at Sony's not-at-all controversial ad campaign for the new white PSP in Europe. With the tagline: WHITE IS COMING. Lovely.
I agree. though I think the 'lets have black and white women assault each other' idea is one of their more idiotic ones.
