Odd phone designs #1

The brand 'not specified' in the mobile phones section in eBay is a veritable Burgess shale of hardware designs which may or may not evolve to the big time. I get a weird thrill from having a look to see what the Chinese designers consider a viable look, and while some of them are truly wacky, there are many which are quite clever. Now and then though, the odd phone really catches my eye, and I just had to post this one: a weird amalgamation of the Nokia 8800 Arte and the LG KT610.

In principle, QWERTY phones need to be long to accomodate the keyboard, so it baffles me just a little that whoever drew up the blueprints decided that this phone also needed a hideaway number pad. Mind you I guess it does make for a sleeker look. The added bonus? Gaming keys because this phone also has a SNES emulator built in!

Retro gaming on the cheap

I am not a portable gamer, but I do love the idea of being able to play all sorts of retro games from the days of 8 and 16-bit consoles in a tiny pocketable device. While looking for more Zodiac stuff, I chanced upon a review of the JXD301 which is not only absolutely tiny, it supports SD cards as well. No word on pricing, but if you are looking for something to play your old ROMs which has a dedicated control panel and is not a PDA, it seems to me hard to go wrong with this one!

My Zodiac in 2007

As I mentioned previously, one of my not-too-recent purchases was a Tapwave Zodiac. I am not all that familiar with Palm as an OS, although neither am I a complete novice: my first ever PDA was a Sony Clié SJ20. This was a small greyscale affair which was great for PIM functions and the occasional eBook, but which was totally unsuitable for mp3 playback or gaming (yes, I do have both the attachments). After that I moved on to the iPAQ h2210 which was a breath of fresh air, being capable of multimedia and multitasking. That cemented by general affiliation for all things Windows Mobile.

So, it was a bit of a challenge to my prejudices when I finally got my Zod. If you are not au fait with the history of the Zodiac, it was basically a Palm OS based device built from the ground up as a gaming console. To this end it has a Motorola MX1 ARM9 processor running at 200 MHz, and a separate graphics accelerator, an ATI Imageon W4200 2D with 8 MB dedicated SDRAM. My Zod is a Zodiac 2 with 128MB of RAM. With an HVGA screen and not one but two SD card slots, even by today’s standards, the Tapwave’s innards compare favourably with current hardware configurations. And the exterior, well, it has got to be one of the most beautiful PDAs ever created with its all metal chassis, an analog control stick and wonderfully tactile shoulder buttons.

Unfortunately, Tapwave the company went belly up in 2005, meaning that development for the Zodiac platform (although not for the Palm platform with which it is compatible) crawled to a halt. This is a shame because many of the games which are available specifically for the Zodiac, like Stuntcar Extreme and Spyhunter, are visually stunning and make full use of the hardware and controllers. Although I have loaded up all manner of games for the Zodiac and for Palm, and a number of game emulators as well, and the Zod does brilliantly at all of them, I must admit that I am not much of a portable gamer.

So what do I actually use the Zodiac for? Well, since I purchased a PalmOne WiFi card to go with the Zod, I can actually go on line. I have tried a number of different browsers including Opera Mini and Picsel (what a faff!), but in the end I have settled on the relatively stable and full-screen Web, the Zod’s default browser. It is hardly full functioned in that it can’t support Flash or AJAX, but is perfectly capable of handling Google Reader and any Google formatted website. The main advantage is the large screen, and relatively high resolution, which makes reading off it a whole lot easier. A pity that ClearType is obviously not supported because it would otherwise make for a near-perfect eBook reader.

Casual gaming: GameBoy Micro vs. Nokia 3300?

I am now well into my thirties, and not really the demographic for the average (or at least my perception of the average) console gamer. That said, I was at Dixon's Duty Free at Stansted a couple of weeks ago, waiting for a flight to Berlin, when I chanced upon the GameBoy Micro.

Way back in the days of my youth I was one of the first few who bought a GameBoy. It was my birthday, I had some cash to spend, and under the instigation of my friend Ju, we went to Far East Plaza in Singapore and picked up one of those black and white (actually, more green) beauties. It came pre-packed with Tetris which was great fun for a while, and I went on to buy Super Mario Land. In the end though, the games were too expensive for a secondary school student with no income, and although "unofficial" cartridges were available with multiple games on board, the relatively poor game play, and the fact that you had to keep squinting at the screen to see anything even with maximum contrast, meant that it died a relatively ignominous death, sliding into oblivion in the back of my bedroom cupboard.

Anyway, back to the GB Micro, and I was amazed at how far things have come, both in the size and quality of the device. The issue with games has not changed though, and they still cost a bundle.

That got me to thinking about devices I already have which could also play games. I do not seek a full console experience and to be honest would only play games on such a small device when I am waiting for a bus or similar situation. A game to kill time. Then I remembered my Nokia 3300 which I bought a while back but got frustrated with. The major problem with that phone as a phone is that it is nearly impossible to synchronize your computer addressbook and calendar with it which I why I eventually upgraded to the Nokia 6230. However, I did miss the rather unusual keyboard layout of the 3300: I have the European edition which as a large D-pad on the left and a number pad on the right. This makes it a really decent gaming device.

It has since been superceded by the N-Gage in both its iterations, but as it handles Java games, the 3300 has a huge library of software available. And the clincher is that if you know where to look for it, much of this can be had for free. Not bad at all for the casual gamer!