“This year in London there were three companies all offering handheld games machines with a difference – they all offer to do more than be simply a games machine. Nokia, who’ve been in the business for a while now with the N-Gage, Tapwave with their Zodiac PDA, and newcomer Gizmondo, with their handheld unit simply called ‘The Gizmondo’. While Nokia actually don’t ever use the phrase, these systems can all be loosely called ‘convergence devices’, a phrase which Gizmondo and Tapwave were certainly falling over themselves to use. I don’t intend to tell you which one is best for you here, each system has a lot to offer, and each system is different.”

As far as I can remember this is the last article that I have posted on Insert Credit, because by this time I became heartily sick of coding the HTML for each page. Admittedly the job is mostly copy and pasting, but I’d had enough of it. That’s not to say it’s the last article that I’ve written for Insert Credit. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to link to a new one (but don’t hold your breath.)

This is one of the oddest and most “of it’s time” articles I’ve ever written; an feature entirely about convergence devices, namely the N-Gage, Gizmondo and the Tapwave Zodiac. Which are now all quite deceased. It’s fun to laugh at them now, but each one had their unique plus points; Stuart Campbell has covered the many positives of the N-Gage quite fully, the Tapwave was a cross between a PSP and a DS (and was simply crying out for some decent support), and the Gizmondo… Well, the Gizmondo felt really, really nice.

Special thanks must be made at this point to my good friend Alex Duin, one of the creative masterminds behind the BBC’s interesting alternate reality game Jamie Kane, for putting me up in London and accompanying me on all of my crazy adventures. The poor sod bought a Zodiac after this article. My bad!