Here is iRiver’s “PSP killer”, the G10 (via New Links). Looks nice, but the PSP is bound to win for two reasons:

1. WipEout Pure (a return to form for the WipEout series!)
2. Lumines (the most addictive puzzle game I’ve played in ages)

While we’re on fancy new-fangled gadgets, I’ve been hearing one or two people predicting that 2006 will herald the end of mobile phones, MP3 players and hand-held games consoles being separate. I doubt this. It’s been tried several times before. As far as I’m concerned, phones are only ever successful as phones.

Sure, camera phones took off, but only as a novelty as far as I’m concerned. If you really want to take a photograph, you are going to reach for the digital camera every time, not the piece of crap that was appended onto your phone as an afterthought.

As for gaming, remember the N-gage? It didn’t kill anything apart from itself. Then there’s the music. Rokr anyone? Here’s a neat article I found via Wikipedia:

What [the Rokr] seems to lack, is any realisation of the fact that actually, it is difficult to make a device which is both a great phone and a great iPod.

The problem is that power limitations mean you don’t want to play too many tunes before your phone goes dead; that you don’t want to have too many calls before your MP3 player goes quiet; and that the controls are a compromise.

I’m sure this time last year Sony were banging on about their “iPod killer” — did it kill the iPod? I bet nobody can even remember what it is now (I certainly can’t). I have a friend who has a Sony Ericsson phone with Walkman branding on it. Another friend asked him if he actually listens to music on it, and he just laughed — of course he uses his iPod to listen to music.

My iRiver can play music (obviously), but you can also view images and text files on it. Have I used either of the latter two functions? Of course not. The images do look quite nice, but why would I need to look at images when I’m on the move? The text function, meanwhile, is really fiddly, and I don’t know what on earth I could use it for. As one entertaining iRiver fanboy told me in the comments once:

your [sic] a twat… the [iRiver] h340 now plays videos aswell (full length movies to watch) … hmm why would you want that you will probably say… and you dont even deserve to know why it has picture and text capabilities, READ YOUR MANUAL!

Translation: “I don’t have the foggiest either!”

If there ever is a decent device that can be used as an MP3 player, a games console and a mobile phone all in one, I’d love to see it — but I’ll have to see it to believe it. In the meantime, I’d use an iRiver for listening to music, a PSP for playing games and, er, my phone to use as a phone.