EricHolsinger.net

Gamepark Holdings announced their newest portable entertainment/gaming device. The new device is called GP2X Wiz, and is a successor to the GP2X and GP2X f-200 devices.

As you may know, I own a GP2X f-200. I really like it. I use Game Editor and a few other tools to write little games and experiment with it. I also use it for watching movies when I travel. I think the touchscreen is awesome and underutilized. Unfortunately the GP2X never seemed to get much love from the homebrew community. No one saw a need to upgrade from GP2X to GP2X f-200. There just wasn’t enough in the package to justify adding a new device with essentially only touchscreen support.

Now, here comes the Wiz. The Wiz has some cool positive points. But it has some negatives which I can see already from the brochure below.

First, the positives.

• smaller form factor than GP2X and GP2X f-200
• an OLED touchscreen
• Flash support (w00t!)
• a microphone for voice recording
• a better pointing device than GP2X f-200, and a slot to store it
• a planned game release schedule - this was fumbled on GP2X, it would be nice to see this on the new device
• more power and all that…

Now for the negatives.

• two freaking D-Pads? WTH?! They just don’t get it. The community whined and wailed for lack of a D-Pad on GP2X and GP2X f-200, so now they release a device with two and no A/B/X/Y buttons.
• A 2.5 headphone jack. Arrgh.
• The L and R buttons on the top of the device look like suckage. I liked the buttons they way they are on the GP2X; we’ll have to see how these new buttons hold up.
• looks like only SD card support. Why no SDHC support?!

Here is the giant JPG brochure announcement for the GP2X Wiz.