My Gizmondo arrived yesterday. Spent a big chunk of the evening playing with it. A Gizmondo is a hand held games machine powered by Windows CE with Nvidia graphics hardware, GPS and GPRS. So it can play music, videos, games, find out where it is and then tell the outsde world about this.

Very nice piece of kit. Of course the day I got it the price dropped 100 pounds. They've released a new version of the device which has hard wired "smart ads". These are piped to the machine over the GPRS connection and can be fired off based on the physical location of the device, i.e. the Gizmondo could ping you as you walk past a shop containing offers that you might be interested in. The good news is that I can get 100 pounds worth of goodies by signing up for the service. They are reasing a navigation system which I wanted to buy anyway, and so I can use my goody money to pay for this.

In use the machine is nice, more akin to a mobile phone than anything else. I transferred some movies from my Creative Jukebox onto a memory card and it played them quite happily (it has media player built in). The Gizmondo will either go on to great things or crash and burn as an idea which was ahead of its time (although the idea will definitely be picked up and used by the big boys at some point in the future). I don't mind too much I'm along for the ride and gadgets are a hobby of mine.