If you frequent classic-console emulation or homebrew game sites, you
may have encountered news items about an ARM-Linux-based handheld
media player named GP2x.  Manufactured by GamePark Holdings of South
Korea, it boasts a moderate price point, a pair of powerful
processors, an industry-standard storage medium, a free developer's
kit and commercial games "soon to come".   Recently, I yielded to
gadget lust and bought one, and, I have to say, so far, I'm quite
pleased.

The first thing I noticed about the unit was the bright, colourful
and sharp LCD.  Although it can be quite hard to see in direct
sunlight, it is bright enough to be easily seen in the shade, and
produces good results on even the darkest of games or movies.  The
tactile feel of the unit is just right, with the buttons well-spaced,
yet easily-reachable during combinations and the thumbstick having a
well-designed hat and just the right amount of give (I have heard
that the first generation models had very badly-built thumbsticks,
but GamePark seems to have heard the complaints and fixed this).
Sound quality is good, if a bit quiet, through the pair of
forward-facing speakers, and the unit's music-playback feature has
several well-thought-out EQ presets built-in.  The built-in image
viewer can display BMPs, PNGs and JPEGs, and has proven to be quite
handy as a preview tool for the output from a digital camera on a
recent road trip.  Movie playback works quite well, producing good
visual and sound quality, although the lack of straight MPEG-1
support is a bit of a hassle, and it seems possible to confuse the
player and crash the unit on certain DivX movies by trying to
fast-forward past the end.

As a game machine, the GP2x seems to be better suited to the types of
games frequently found on 16-bit consoles than the current generation
multiple-billion-triangle-per-second titles, as it has no hardware 3D
support; however, it is very fast, has good internal bandwidth, and
is versatile enough to the point that hackers have begun cobbling
together fast 3D demos already, and one fully 3D driving game is
planned to go on sale for the unit later this year.  Built with a
pair of ARM-9s, it has proven to be fast enough to run Quake 1,
though, sustaining between 12 and 20 frames a second, and has been
shown to be capable of emulating a PlayStation 1, getting about seven
frames a second in Final Fantasy VII, and work has already begun to
bring ports of both TinyGL and OpenGL-ES to the unit.  In addition,
I've seen several demos that approach 750,000 triangles per second,
which seems to indicate that, in the right hands, it should be
possible to build content that matches later PSX and Sega Saturn
games for visual quality.

Of course, with all this, the obvious question arises: how does it
stack up to the current generation of mass-market handhelds?  The
answer is that it doesn't seem to try to, and does something entirely
different instead.  It's unclear exactly what the target market is
for GP2x; although it's a great unit and hacker/coder/tinkerer types
seem to be snapping them up at a rapid pace, the public-at-large
doesn't seem to know about them, and, lacking the fast, flashy 3D of
the other machines, even if it were well-known to the public, it
might still be ignored.  On the other hand, it could appeal to those
who would like a good machine to run emulators or homemade games on
without having to worry that the next firmware will lock them out.

However things play out, the machine is already a success, in a way -
a tremendous homebrew community has grown up around it overnight,
such that even if commercial support is nonexistant, there will
always be something fun to play on it.  And with any luck, it's
sending a signal to the Big Three that consumers would be willing to
pay a little extra to be able to run their own software on game
consoles without having to void the warranty.