While neither Sony nor Nintendo really embrace the homebrew scene with their handhelds, there is a large and dedicated group of followers who rarely buy official games for the PSP or DS. These people encode their own movies to use on the PSP, as cheap and increasingly large media sticks make the PSP quite the attractive media player. Likewise, with a few choice programs and a flash-linker, running emulators and homebrew software on the DS is a simple thing. What if there was a console that made all this easy for you? Instead of having to get around Sony and Nintendo's safeguards to install your software, wouldn't it be great if there was a system that embraced emulators and homebrew software? A lot of you already know what I'm getting at here, but for people not in the know, welcome to the GP2X-F100.
First, the price is a very attractive US$179.99. The system is pretty powerful; it sports a 240 MHz dual core processor, 64MB of RAM, and 64MB of internal NAND memory. It even throws in a TV-out jack, which is a nice selling point. Out of the box, the system does very little. There are almost no official games and nothing comes installed on the system except the Linux OS. The draw is that it's completely open. Drag and drop almost any video file (the system supports an impressive array of file types) and it'll play. Mp3s are no problem. There's a robust image viewer. All your emulators, ROMs, and homebrew apps will run with no problems. Want to try creating a game for it? The SDK is free and there's a detailed wiki with information about the platform.
MaxConsole was pretty impressed with the unit when they reviewed it, and it seems like a great little system for people who don't want to have to worry about the firmware on their PSP, and want to get busy hacking. I may pick one of these up for my mobile video pleasure, so expect more coverage in the future. For right now, this is a strong, flexible platform with very little in terms of limitations. Sure you have to look for your own content, but there's enough out there that will run on this system you won't run out of games for years. A truly open source platform is a great idea, and this seems to be a solid product for the price.
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