Gizmondo

So usually it's all E3 this and E3 that this time of year. Looks the PSP is in another color! The DS is in another color! Blah Blah Blah but here's some hard news for you. According the on-going soap opera that is Gizmondo's former CEO Stephan has made his 3 million dollar bail according to the Console Conspiracy. Such a good story of excess, video games and crooked CEO's getting what they deserve...I can't stop watching.

So for those of you that have been playing along you know that Sweedish game CEO Stephan Erikson of Gizmondo has been having a tough time lately. But now according to the boys over the Console Conspiracy he is getting his precious cars taken away and is being held on 5 million dollar bail. Head on over and check out his entiresad, sad tale.

I know I will run my $500,000 Ferrari into a pole shearing it in half! Stefan Ericksson from Gizmondo recently crashed the hell out of his ferrari in LA. The best part is that he claimed not be driving it when the accident happened. He "claims" that a German man named "Fritz" was the driver and left the scene before police arrived. And that he didn't know Fritz's last name, he had just met him in a bar that night. Hmmmm....Check the photos out over a the CC.

Saw a great little story over in Next Generation about Gizmondo and how they plan to release a wide-screen PSP killer. Their CEO said this "We're looking at bringing out future generations early next year, a wide screen version of our device that's not dissimilar in the size to the screen of the Sony PSP." The handheld Gizmondo device was launched in Europe in March and is due here in the USA in October. It currently has a 2.8-inch TFT screen in comparison to PSP's 4.3 inch screen.

So they haven't even released a product yet in the USA and they are already making plans for a "widescreen" version? Brave marketing pioneers or fools? I will let you all decide that one....

For those of you paying attention the original launch date of Gizmondo here in the USA was supposed to be August 11th. Well according to our friends over the pond at the Register, the date will now be sometime on October. A spokeswoman for Gizmondo was qouted as saying "August is a slow month for retail, and with two major items of software delayed, it made little sense to launch the machine". Those two items of software? The company won't say but folks on the internet (being genisus that we are) have speculated that one is top-tier US game title (Madden 06, ESPN,etc) and the other is a navigation based game tied into the systems GPS functionality.

I have always liked the Gizmondo, so whenever see some news for ya guys about it, I will be sure to pick up on it. Sadly this seems like bad news... at least for the UK. Apparently someone over at headquarters must be going crazy, because Gizmondo recently fired 28 people on their UK staff. They said they plan to relocate their offices to the US, while only just last week they mentioned they would opened an L.A. office while "streamlining its European operation." Hopefully this will be helpful to the company in getting the product noticed more in the US.

Tiger Telematics Press Release

Via Kotaku

The worse epidemic of portable gadgets of all shapes and sizes is the tangled mess they leave in your bag. Sure, portable typically means sans wires, but they all have them. Thingamajigs don't just charge wirelessly. Well, I guess they can, but do yours? No! Most likely you, like all other geeks, learned to wrap and tie a long cable faster and easier than tying your own shoes. But even with wrapping skills in hand most of us are too lazy to mess with it each time we use a device. Well in that regard, Cableyoyo comes to your rescue. This device is thin enough it can be pocketed and not show a geekyline (That's the pantyline created in your pants pockets by all your gadgets.) You can easily throw multiples of the Cableyoyo in your tech bag and not worry about untangling whenever you need gadget juice. And, it works with ALL the handhelds we cover here on Portagame.

[Cableyoyo via GadgetMadness]

E3 is all done and finished as of yesterday. It was a hard up year, with news on the Xbox 360, PS3, Gameboy Micro, and of course the Revolution! Check out all the Portagame E3 news during this past week. Who knows, there may be more too.

So what's with all the Next-gen, non-Handheld links? Well, I took the first couple of weeks in May and started working on a pet project. This project would gather news and information for me on the subjects I'm interested in and the subjects I report on here and in other places across the net. The project is basically a series of online RSS readers for my personal use, but displayed publicly. I'm still hacking on them, and not quite sure what the finished version will be like. It's like a sandbox. I currently call the project Blu RSS, or BluRSS for short. And yes, one of the subjects of huge interest to me, was E3. For the most part, BluRSS is fairly automated. So I will be able to turn the majority of my attention back to Portagame.

Also, while we're on the topic of E3, did you catch all the E3 news over at 4ColorRebellion? Or what about Ferrago, which includes all the headlines from the best gaming sites on the net (including Portagame). Our pal dmgice had some well done video coverage, especially of the Gameboy Micro. Also check out NDS.Progressive who caught the DS version of A Boy and His Blob (nice!). Don't miss the console videos dug up by iamlegend. Or the DS title list. I'll be doing PSP, Gizmondo and GBA wrapups this weekend too, so stay tuned. There's plenty more out there, these are just to help you get started. We didn't see anything Tapwave or GP32 related, looking specifically for third-party applications. We didn't expect any either, so no big deal. Next year we'll do a scavanger hunt or something.

I really don't know how geeks and/or bloggers are going to survive this week with the Launch of Star Wars Episode III on Thursday at Midnight. If you, the innocent public, have never heard a geek orgasm (and it's not pretty), you will by the end of this week. Perhaps multiple geekgasms. Starting today, E3 is taking on L.A. and the internet, and all its kinds of bloggers, by storm. If you happen to have a Willy Wonka golden ticket and are inside the E3 doors, you'll most likely notice hundreds of teenage-to-twenty-something video game geeks walking around with a digital camera and 50 memory cards on a giant keychain and a laptop, most likely light--but any will do, permanently open with one hand strapped to it. This known as an E3 blogger (and yes, they are half-droid for you curious Star Wars fans). The E3 bloggers Laptop serves two purposes. With a camera fed directly into the laptop, it serves as navigation so the blogger can avoid eye contact and immediately take a picture of any game and/or "booth babe" that gets within range. The second purpose is to blog the picture they had just taken.

And sadly, this year, I will not be one of the E3 blogger half-droids. No, sadly I'm missing this show due to a recent "incident" involving myself, my car, some dude, and his car. No one was injured, it's just the traffic lawyers that like to charge more than typical bloggers make. So I'll be armchair quarterbacking E3 this year with most the other Portagame editors. I do know of one editor that was able to make it and we look forward to his updates. But in the meantime we'll keep you updated on all the other news we find about E3 that you might have interest in (99% will be portable gaming, but we'll probably make the obvious PS3 and Nintendo Revolution announcements). And since there ARE so many bloggers at E3 this year, it will be easy for us to datamine the important stuff and spit it all out here. So, sit back, relax, it's E3!

(PS: We did create a series of other sites that will track the most prominent RSS feeds of all the the systems that will be displayed at E3 (and beyond) , but due to another agreement we have, we can't publicly share them just yet. You'll need to wait until we make a formal announcement, which will be this week or next week).

Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention but this is the first real Gizmondo Review I have read. And it's a doozy. While the author raves about the sleek lines and stylish interface he then procedds to brutally rip apart everything from the launch titles to the weak GPS and battery life. There are also some scary qualities of the Gizmondo, such as the ability to monitor where the device is at all times. Kinda big brother I would think. The author ends up giving it a 40%. Go check it out and let us know your thoughts......