Top Ten Handhelds That Didn't Make It?

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Over at GameSpy, they're running a feature looking at the top ten handhelds that never made it. Included on the list are such 'favorites' as the Atari Lynx and the more recent Nokia N-Gage, as well as commentary by the GameSpy editors on why these portables failed to set the gaming world on fire."

Another name for the article could be

[lightspawn]

"Top Ten non-Nintendo handhelds".

It's just that there are very few (multi-game) handhelds, so most of them are in there.

In summary: battery life is much, much more important that anybody would think. Nintendo got lucky with its B/W (actually green/gray) display that required relatively little battery life and the popular franchises didn't hurt any.

Oh, and the Lynx's ultrathick design gives me cramps after playing certain games for only a few minutes.

Maybe this is a market with only enough room for one mainstream system?

Re:Cybiko

[Zerth]

I never bought the "extreme" version, but the original one was dang spiffy. Yes, the games sucked since they were turned out by underemployed russians, but it came with a C compiler so you could always write your own. I even got the mp3 attachment, although that was mostly for the extra storage space, rather than wanting to use it as an mp3 player. It had a decent text reader and could hold several dozen books in the mp3 player's memory. Oddly, I don't use it much now, because the mp3 player's memory seems to have gone south and the internal disk only holds like half a book.

Re:The Turbo Express

[NanoGator]

"It's ONLY drawback was the power consumption."

It was also too big. I used to have one of these, and it was a bitch carrying it around.