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Game Boy Gets Videophone Attachment
Thanks to the San Jose Mercury News for their article about a new videophone peripheral for the Game Boy Advance, being launched in Japan this December. According to the article, "The 13,000 yen (US$110) Campho Advance... slips into the top of the Game Boy Advance just like any video-game cassette. When connected to an analog telephone outlet [and someone with the same equipment], the display shows live video of the person on the other end of the line... Your own image will show up in the corner of the display." There's also a picture of the Campho Advance over at Famitsu.com.
How is this going to work with the new GBAs? Isn't the cart completely hidden behind the screen?
I just pooped your party.
till japanese 'call girls' get a new extra job and give phone sex a whole new dimension?-)
:).
just had to do it, sorry
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This thing has the same bad design flaw it looks like. The n-cage you gotta take apart to change the game. Here you gotta change the game to make it a phone :) and just how the fuck do you dial?
Oh well at $110 I think it will share the same success as the n-cage. To expensive for something that can be done by dedicated hardware so much better and more easily.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It does sound pretty cool, seems like tv sci fi is coming to a local reality near you.
Now all they need to do is build it into a watch and make it holographic, yeah I would buy that.
It's always funny until someone gets hurt. Then it's just hilarious. -B.Hicks-
I always thought they should make a cartridge with a mini hard drive and USB connector (to load it at a PC) for having a nifty Linux platform too, provided all the applications on the drive are made to work with the joypad rather than some sort of keyboard emulation kludge.
My god how many more perpherals are they going to add to this thing. I bet if you had them all hooked up at once the thing would be the size of a desktop PC.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
finally a videophone i would actually buy! the gba will play games and i bet it's not as expensive as one of those dedicated videophones too.
he said videogame "cassette!" hahaha! thats what my uncool, uninformed grandma calls them! hahaha
Of course, with the Game Boy's relatively tiny screen, maybe they could make this work. Since it sounds like this widget's already out on the market, it would have been nice to see some screenshots of what the video actually looked like.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
you're going to have to shine a light at the screen so you can see it, and shine a light at yourself so they can see you the whole time you're on the phone. No roaming around your room with that going on.
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How would this work on the GBA SP? They'd have to have a special mode for the camera to work upside-down. It's likely that anyone who would get a videophone attachment for a GBA is probably using the SP.
and someone with the same equipment
This is the real tragedy of video telephony systems. They all use different standards. The technology has been there to do it in one form or another for years, but who would go and buy one if you can only talk to other people using the same device?
This gadget sounds promising - it's fairly cheap, and goes after an existing userbase - but all the same if the technology isn't an open standard, or if it can't talk to devices made by other manufacturers, it will remain a toy, rather than anything more useful.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Of course, if you plug this thing into a GameBoy SP you'll get an upside-down picture up your nose.
""Given that phone lines are limited to about 33.6K on a good day (56K only works if you've got an ISP picking you up at the first switch before you get filtered), are you actually going to be able to see real, intelligible video through this? I remember back in the modem days, VoIP was ok when net congestion wasn't bad but videoconferencing was a lost cause.""
""Oh well at $110 I think it will share the same success as the n-cage. To expensive for something that can be done by dedicated hardware so much better and more easily.""
As far as the video goes, it really depends on how good the codecs are. You can do some really wicked things with streaming video if you got the right set of codecs even on "pots" bandwidth. Look at existing video phone service you buy at Best Buy.
And the price isn't too bad if you look at how much current video phone equipment costs. Just for the startup package at Best Buy, you are looking at $600 to get started.
I already have multiple GBA's that me and my wife both share. If i were going to go on a trip and wanted to speak and see my family, then this is a pretty decent idea. Hell I could even take it to work and just plug it in to one of the phone lines and call on my break like i normally do. No need for lugging a laptop to work and having to pay for dialup service just to use a little shitty webcam for 20 minutes on my break.
Any geek who thinks that $110 is too much to spend on a new gadget might want to re-think their status of "geekdom". I know I've wasted plenty of money on far more expensive failed technologies. But that's the way the wyrm turns eh?
The only real question left is how many people at Nokia are yelling obscenities because of this.
Glog!
Since they've added a modem, they might as well toss in some dial-up internet support. There should be enough power in the GBA to support a SSH session or two. Plus a web browser. It'd be a pain to enter text though...