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.

Comments

how long..

[gl4ss]

till japanese 'call girls' get a new extra job and give phone sex a whole new dimension?-)

just had to do it, sorry :).

Re:how long..

[Kris_J]

There needs to be a "+1 Not as stupid as the poster thinks" option...

N-cage?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Ehm am I the only who thinks this is a spoof of the N-cage joke? You know the japanese proofing that they can make a joke toy just as good as the europeans?

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.

Now if it were cordless

[CheeseEatingBulldog]

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.

Not surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

The GBA, while only as powerful as the lower end PDAs, still has more than enough processing power for most portable applications and a color screen to boot. I'd bet it's already got MP3 players.

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.

Re:Not surprising.

[FortissimoWily]

"The GBA, while only as powerful as the lower end PDAs, still has more than enough processing power for most portable applications and a color screen to boot. I'd bet it's already got MP3 players."
The GBA does indeed have an MP3 device available for it, JTLYK ;) It's an official gadget, too - been in Japan for a while, and should be available in the West pretty soon.

Re:New GBAs

[Komarosu]

also the SP has the cart at the bottom, not the top like the original

Yikes.

[darkmayo]

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.

cool

[nocent]

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.

Re:New GBAs

[baerwb]

Wouldn't be upside down, on the screen there is the word "flip" I imagine this means you can flip the image over the horizontal axis.

I'd like to see screenshots

[tessaiga]

When connected to an analog telephone outlet, the display shows live video of the person on the other end of the line, who must also own both the Game Boy Advance and the Campho Advance. Your own image will show up in the corner of the display. Campho Advance, which goes on sale only in Japan in December, requires no Internet service provider.

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.

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 crappy thing about it on a classic GBA,

[pecosdave]

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.

GBA SP

[Dr. Jest]

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.

the same equipment

[Spudley]

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.

GameBoy SP

[cpuwizard]

Of course, if you plug this thing into a GameBoy SP you'll get an upside-down picture up your nose.

This practically posts itself

[Mirkon]

The only real question left is how many people at Nokia are yelling obscenities because of this.

Toss in some web software...

[WoTG]

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...