Economic crisis halts Gizmondo relaunch

By Robert Purchese Published 22 December, 2008

Freer having a rethink and redesign.

Gizmondo father Carl Freer has had to postpone the Christmas relaunch of the fabled handheld because the economy is less healthy than a bag of crisps.

"Unfortunately, we've had to reschedule the launch of Gizmondo. It's due to the economic climate in the US, as well as in the rest of the world. It has affected us in our ability to fund and get funded in regards to the manufacturing of components," Freer told The Nordic Link.

"We've had some very, very touch and go moments here for three months. It has affected everyone. I was at one point thinking of abandoning the whole project, because I didn't see a way out of it; a way to fund it.

"I don't have half a billion dollars or 300 million dollars. You can only try and do your best," he said.

Freer had run into problems with the Chinese company manufacturing the handheld, which has lead to an entire rethink not only of how to get to market, but also of the hardware itself.

His latest lightbulb idea is to turn the Gizmondo into a smartphone with a 3D graphics chip and, more importantly, an open platform.

"If you look at gaming devices today, they consist mainly of the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS. There are a few other renegades, the Game Park and so on, but what we are talking about is creating a fully wireless Pocket PC, one that also has a gaming engine," added Freer.

"There is nothing out there in the market that has the open source AppStore compatibility that we are talking about."

This will likely push the price point over the magical USD 99 figure Freer had hoped to re-enter the market at this Christmas. But then this Gizmondo will actually be a phone, although quite a large one by the sound of it.

Incidentally, those who once bought the original Gizmondo will be able to trade the old model in for the Chinese-manufactured bunch that are presumably not being used for much else now.

All we need now is a release date. We'll not hold our breath.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (43) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • thisisatempaccount #1 3 years ago

    So what you're saying is, a paper-thin investment scam isn't going to garner much funding from gullible stupids in a climate where the world is no longer convinced that confidence alone can fuel an endless golden age of global economic growth?

  • moggsy #2 3 years ago

    He sounds like a gibbering fool to me. Is this even newsworthy? Suppose it's good for a laugh.

  • kangarootoo #3 3 years ago

    If there is any space for a reasonably powered device to make a significant mobile/handheld console crossover, the iPhone is filling up that space like hot gas.

    It doesn't seem like good business sense to me to put anything into a market that is already covered by a slew of common platform mobile phones, the iPhone, the DS and the PSP. Which tiny crack in that coverage is the Gizmondo hoping to squeeze into?

  • Lexx87 #4 3 years ago

    iPhone already killed the thing before it even came out. Oh well.

  • mingster #5 3 years ago

    "There is nothing out there in the market that has the open source AppStore compatibility that we are talking about."

    umm what about iphone?

  • Redeye #6 3 years ago

    Having the same appeal as leprosy halts Gizmondo relaunch.

    /fixed

  • Olemak #7 3 years ago

    So he's going to make an iPhone?

  • kangarootoo #8 3 years ago

    @mingster

    The iPhone app store isn't really open source though is it?

  • BonzoBanana #9 3 years ago

    There was a market for the gamepark gp32 but it was only about 30,000 units. I suppose this would have been a good idea if the psp and DS hadn't been completely hacked but you can put all your emulators and homebrew on those plus run commercial games. I'm a gizmondo owner myself and for the £17 plus postage I paid from ebay I'm really happy. It emulates snes and megadrive well and has a handful of decent gizmondo games that I downloaded for free. Well worth the money. It really depends on how good the gizmondo 2 is. Lets say it was the first 1ghz handheld and it could emulate consoles like the gamecube, dreamcast, xbox, playstation etc you'd probably have a hit depending on price. Maybe it could run classic pc games and have a analogue joypad that worked well. It really depends on how good a platform it is.

  • kangarootoo #10 3 years ago

    I guess I didn't really consider the homebrew and emulator scenes.

    Are they big enough to make a success of any platform though?

    And if Gizmondo expect free software to be a core part of their model, what will that do to the initial cost of the platform (which would be whewre they make their money, if a lot of the software is free)?

  • presh #11 3 years ago

    Sounds like he want's to launch Nokia N-Gage. Again.

    Still, I hope he gets the funding he needs, only becuase I find the whole Gizmondo thing so brilliantly fecked.

  • SEVQA #12 3 years ago

    The buttons of the Gizmondo will be coated with LSD - to make you think you can play games on it with amazing graphics whearas your just having a bad trip and the device is actually a paper weight!

  • peterfll #13 3 years ago

    Will there ever be a good time to relaunch the Gizmondo?

  • Razzajazz #14 3 years ago

    There's no justice in this world, we have to sit here and listen about Gizmondo "2", while the Neo Geo Pocket died a death! Now that's a handheld console that should have been relaunched multiple times and had millions of dollars of venture capital thrown at it.

  • penhalion #15 3 years ago

    I wonder how many investers were taken for the ride this time?

  • IneptPercy #16 3 years ago

    I will buy one if its any good, purely because I refuse to buy from apple, which means there is a market gap to me.

  • moggsy #17 3 years ago

    @ IneptPercy

    Why's that?

  • bushwod #18 3 years ago

    shame

  • penhalion #19 3 years ago

    On stranger, though hardly unexpected rumour, news it looks like factor five has been killed by lair just as haze killed free radical. I hope that studios now understand that, like movie actors before them, you are only as good as your last release. Fans don't buy crap no matter who produced it.
    Edited by 1 at 22/12/08 @ 17:39

  • SharkVLion #20 3 years ago

    Anyone who's gullible enough to invest in Freer's scam after what happened last time around deserves to lose all thier money

  • teabagger #21 3 years ago

    So, the delay is absolutely nothing at all to do with it being shit then?

  • JDub #22 3 years ago

    "I was at one point thinking of abandoning the whole project..."

  • themerlin13 #23 3 years ago

    It sounds like he has to much money and time!!

    It will never work. LOL.

  • mkreku #24 3 years ago

    Hey, I got the NGage, I might as well get this too.

  • aldo_14 #25 3 years ago

    Surely 'Basic Sanity halts Gizmodo relaunch'?

  • Ryze #26 3 years ago

    No chance. Give up now.

  • rascoj64 #27 3 years ago

    What a complete load of fu##ing sh#t, first the Phantom, now this. What a total waste of money who the fuc#k comes up with this sh#t and gets it signed off? It's never in a gazillion years ever gonna do anything but loose lots of money! As#holes!

  • evilboo #28 3 years ago

    We're full of the xmas spirit in this comment thread. Give the poor bastard the chance to make his device. Maybe it'll be good.

  • rascoj64 #29 3 years ago

    no it won't

  • IneptPercy #30 3 years ago

    I refuse to buy from apple as they don't make amazing products, just decent ones which look nice.

    They nearly went under and the the imac saved them (rubbish PC's in a range of colours)

    Laptops are underpowered and overpriced, yes MAC OS etc is easy to use, but at the expense of advanced options, but the laptops are 3 mm thinner and white so people buy them.

    Ipods, yes great I can carry all my music about... how about being able to play it back with some kind of decent quality.

    Video Ipods, who actually thinks it good to watch something on such a small screen.

    IPhone, great it does all that... does it phone people? does it fit in your pocket? do I need a touch screen to phone somebody? I will admit this is aimed at many phones but the Iphone is the worse offender.

    Please don't all tell me apple are great, you won't change my mind so we will never agree, making any debate pointless.

  • Ryze #31 3 years ago

    ^ You are Victor Meldrew AICM£5

  • rascoj64 #32 3 years ago

    Well I don't know about apples but I refuse to eat sprouts. They are the devils sporn and deserve to be left in the ground not on my dinner plate!

  • IneptPercy #33 3 years ago

    "^ You are Victor Meldrew AICM£5 "

    that made me laugh.

    Not many things I rant about in life, just apple and those really small cars like the Maitz and such like and of course as mentioned... sprouts

  • penhalion #34 3 years ago

    Totally agree about the apple thing. I am getting a macbook aluminium because of work but, I think they are stupidly over priced and don't deserve the praise they seem to command.

    I genuinely don't know how they get away with it. Especially in this economic climate.

  • AOFanboi #35 3 years ago

    <em>MAC OS etc is easy to use, but at the expense of advanced options</em>

    Ignorant much? Mac OS X is a fully-featured BSD-family Unix - do you dare compare that to the "hackOS" from Redmond? Does it confuse you that you don't press "Start" to stop? Do you like the simplicity of cmd.exe over what you can do with a proper shell?

    Macs are "overpriced" in the same way BMWs are: You get what you pay for. You can go to Dell/Toyota and get a cheaper product if you like though...

  • SEVQA #36 3 years ago

    As already mentioned "Especially in this economic climate."

    I think I will go to Dell/Toyota thank you very much.

    I don’t own anything Mac as I find it a pretentious and shit brand but that’s my opinion - doesn’t mean I didn’t have to buy gifts for victims of Apple's. And seeing a screen protector for an iPhone cost a ten quid then all I have to say is - LOL LOL LOL!

  • BonzoBanana #37 3 years ago

    Confounder is right. Apple owners are hideous. It all makes sense now.

  • IneptPercy #38 3 years ago

    Not even going to add the compatibility issues if on a Mac, yes you can run bootcamp, but if that's the plan then why not save £300 and get a better computer with windows in the first place.

    Glad to see I am not alone in seeing apple for what they truly are, thought I would be outcast.

    Yes they are very pretty, but that just doesn't cut it for me

  • Ryze #39 3 years ago

    ^ Man I hate those stupid Daewoo Matiz cars!!!!

    Them, Nissan Micras and fucking Yaris' cars!! I wasn't even adding emphasis - I always refer to them as a fucking Yaris!

    'Move that fucking Yaris!'

  • m0thr4 #40 3 years ago

    @IneptPercy

    You might save £300, but you wouldn't be getting a better computer, you'd simply be getting one built from cheaper component parts.

  • m0thr4 #41 3 years ago

    When you get to the hardware, for the price you pay for a mac, you are paying for a name, a brand and the design. These factors do not improve my pc's specs so i am not going to pay money for these aspects. So as i said before, let the idiots by them, it makes them easier to identify and avoid.

    wankers.


    So what's wrong with paying extra for a decent design if you have the money to do so? I mean technically, if we were all on tight budgets, we would all live in cheap, soulless, identikit houses on vast sprawling estates and drive cheap, plasticky cars that look as if they've been designed by an accountant.


    I don't want a power hungry PC tower full of noisy cooling fans cluttering up my room, so I paid that extra money for a silent, energy efficient, computer that is built into the back of a high quality 24" 1920x1200 LCD screen (amazingly the whole thing is less than 2" thick) and yet still has the necessary hardware to play all the latest PC games at a decent resolution.


    Call me a wanker if you like, but I'd rather be a wanker than a bitter and resentful twat.

  • m0thr4 #42 3 years ago


    I don't think he compared mac osx to windows at all, remember you can get fantastic distro's of linux like Ubuntu that will work on most machines and pretty much can do anything mac OSX does.

    Oh my aching sides... I'm forced to use Ubuntu at work (developing software) because my company thinks it saves money. Every single piece of software is unfinished abandonware... shite to use and buggy as hell. I end up working 3 days a week from home just to get some actual work done instead of arsing around trying to compile my own applications because the bundled Ubuntu version is stripped of all the useful features (Netbeans, stand up and take a bow).

  • itsfuzzy #43 3 years ago

    The original Gizmondo should be enough to stop a relaunch. Or even the real life gangsters who ran the company.