Palm Boy!

If you're a busy executive who's always on the move (shyeah) then the chances are you have a Palm Pilot to help you keep track of your daily schedule and all those fiddly addresses you can never remember; it's a fairly common office supplement these days. But of course, in reality when you're on your own in the back of a taxi or your luxurious leather-clad office on the fifth floor, you check that the coast is clear and fire up Asteroids, or Tetris, or something else you managed to download behind the backs of your technical staff. Gaming on the Palm Pilot is an industry unto itself, but it's a joy since everything's free. Most of the games are only a few Kilobytes so you can fit loads of them onto a single Palm device, which is why everyone has them. But if you've been a follower of this noble art for some time you'll know that although the games can be very entertaining for short periods of time, the controls can be a dreadful hindrance for the majority of it. With the aid of Worldwide Widget Works (an American company, incidentally), the PDA is about to become usable. Their adapter, which slots onto the bottom of your Palm Pilot, acts like the controls of a GameBoy and allows you to play games like Asteroids the way they were gloriously intended. At least, that's what we'd like to happen. In reality the situation is unfortunately a little less pleasing. Creators WWW are charging a rather unfriendly $90 for an SDK and an early Game Pad so that developers can equip their software with compatability, and while this may not seem much to you or I, the people who code these games do so in their spare time, for no return. The slightly more commercial outfits like the famous Dreadling (formerly Doomling) are indeed likely to cough up to ensure compliance, but the bedroom programmer hacking away at his Palm compilation software isn't going to want to bother. So the jury's out on WWW's new toy - there's definitely a market for it, but perhaps it's not yet ready for such a device.

Source - The Register