2. Features

The Gizmondo itself is very nice to look at. The system's small size means it's better suited to younger hands than Sony's PlayStation Portable or Nintendo's DS. However, unlike the DS, it only features one screen and is not touch sensitive.

The 2.8 inch TFT display featured on the Gizmondo is slightly smaller than the three inch dual screens integrated into the DS and quite a lot smaller than the 4.3 inch widescreen system employed by Sony's PSP. The display - capable of showing 65,536 colors simultaneously - is well short of its two rivals, with 260,000 colors on the DS and 16.77 million available on the PSP. Despite its clear screen limitations, three brightness settings and a 240x320 pixel resolution display bring a good level of crispness and clarity.

A 128-bit Nvidia GoForce 4500 3D graphics accelerator provides enough power to make it a credible games machine and the result is a portable device featuring better looking games than the PlayStation, but not as good as the PlayStation 2 or PSP. The powerful Samsung ARM9 400Mhz processor drives the Gizmondo and the whole unit is run via Microsoft's Windows CE.net operating system.

In order to provide some serious competition for Sony's all-singing, all-dancing PSP, Gizmondo needs to be much more than just a games machine and this it most certainly is.

There's multimedia messaging, an MP3 music player, an Mpeg-4 movie player, a 640x480 resolution digital camera and a GPRS link to allow wide-area network gaming. Furthermore, a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip is also featured, offering location based services and - as an optional extra - in-car satellite navigation. The device is also Bluetooth ready and its choice of media is the SD card, which is more commonly found in use with digital cameras and PDAs.

The Gizmondo can be easily linked up to a PC to transfer music or movie files to the unit's SD card and - what's more - you can also AutoSync Outlook and your contacts database. A 256 MB SD card comes with the device and with 2 GB SD cards now available, the Gizmondo is able to match the 1.8 GB of storage on Sony's Universal Media Discs.