Dan Chiappini04 July 2006, 7:57 AM
Only a few months after launching the product in the UK, the Linux-based GP2X game console is making its way down under. There's talk around the geek water coolers that this could be the PSP/iPod killer everyone has been waiting for.
Only a few months after launching the product in the UK, the
GP2X is making its way
down under. The Linux-based hand-held is positioned at the same sort of consumers who would buy the
Nintendo DS and Sony’s
PlayStation Portable (PSP).
Sitting somewhere between the two for price, it will launch at AU$249 for the basic pack, or AU$367 with a 1GB SD card and AC adaptor. There’s talk around the geek water coolers that this could be the PSP/iPod killer everyone has been waiting for.
The GP2X allows users to not only play homebrew, free, downloadable games, but also use the console as a portable media viewer for photos, movies and music. Best of all, it runs for anywhere up to six hours on two AA batteries depending on what you’re doing with it.
Sure, with the exception of the AA batteries powering it, the PSP can do all of these things with purchased media (such as UMD movies and games), but until now there’s been a whole bunch of screwing around to re-encode your own content to get it working on a MemoryStick DUO.
The GP2X is really built around the ‘give the community the hardware and a direction and see what they do with it’ philosophy and ships to users with a Linux and Windows compiler and SDK, so if you see a need for an app or game, and it doesn’t exist, you can go right ahead and develop it yourself.
The PSP has an established foothold in the market as one of the portable multimedia devices of choice, perhaps partly due to the lack of major brand alternatives.
While the PSP has always been focused on games first, with the option to do web browsing, mp3 playback etc, the push behind homebrew games and applications is what really gets the community’s gears cranking.
Afterall, there’s nothing sweeter than tossing aside all the pixel porn of the new Tomb Raider game when you can crack cutting edge tech to run an emulated version of 1995’s smash hit: Kirby’s Avalanche.
That said, it is the quality of the games that will keep users buying the PSP, because frankly, as cool as it is that you can develop your own titles, you wouldn’t buy a $250 GP2X for these - even if you can get 7 slightly different versions of Tetris on that page alone.
I can see major potential for community-driven handheld content, particularly from the application point of view, and the Linux community are just the tech savvy users to grab that bull by the horns and show everyone what they can do.
However, whether the majority of users who are after a handheld multimedia device will vote with their dollars on mass-market pre-packaged goods or roll-your-own options remain to be seen. And something tells me that the smart money will remain on the former.