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Helix - Handheld Game Platform From Ex-Palm Staff
madopal writes "It seems Reuters is reporting that some ex-Palm officials have announced a new gaming platform called Helix. The company is called Tapwave, but there's nothing on their site yet." This article in the San Jose Mercury News has a few more details - apparently, the unit will even feature an analog joystick and trigger buttons, and with its Palm OS organizer functionality, is apparently aimed at an older, more crossover audience than the Gameboy Advance.
What I think would make a project like this REALLY stand out is Wireless (or wired, I guess...) internet and/or network access. Cell phone technology allows games to be played over net connections, lets make a portable game machine do it!
-baron
Polaroid. See what develops!!
I'm all for competition in the mobile gamming market, but I have information for Nokia and Tapwave. There are more than just kids who use the GBA. I have serious doubts that a lot of 12-year-olds were chomping at the bit to install their afterburner. I would guess that mostly adults were looking at that upgrade. I doubt that many kids are playing Golden Sun or Advance Wars. I don't think that it's impossible for them to do so, but I think there are many older gamers that play these titles. The bottom line is that there better be a dang good reason for adult gamer to buy another portable machine cuz the GBA does just fine for adults.
My point is that the GBA certainly has an adult following (probably much more than the original GB or GBC). I would be absolutely estatic if N came out with a GBA SP2 with added PDA features (maybe a built-in warning alarm, "you have been playing for 12 hours straight, eat food and attend to bodily functions!). It wouldn't be too difficult for N to produce such a thing and you can bet if N-gauge or something else starts to eat up too much of the portable market that N will start to move (not fast, but they will eventually). Heck maybe their already thinking of such a hybrid beast such as N-gauge. It can't be too far from their mind. They lost the console market to Sony, and if they lost the portable market I think N would be dead in the water. For that reason I think they came out with the SP. That was the ace up their sleave in case someone were to come out with a competing product with a better screen. N knows what it is to go from hero to zero (well, not zero.... Maybe 2 or 3 out of 5, but they do suffer in the console market).
Connell and Lim said the target audience for the Helix consists of people 18 years to 34 years old who have largely "graduated" from Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s (7974.OS) Game Boy Advance portable gaming unit.
What audience are they talking about there? this is almost troll-like rhetoric i'd more expect to find on a pro-xbox anti-everything else messageboard.
maybe it's the audience that doesn't know the difference between a good game and a bad game.