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Gizmondo

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Tiger Telematics redirects here; and is not to be confused with the Hasbro owned toy manufacturer Tiger Electronics and American electronics retailer, Tiger Direct.

Gizmondo
File:Gizmondo (logo).jpg
File:Gizmondoblack.jpg
ManufacturerTiger Telematics
TypeHandheld game console
GenerationSeventh generation era
Lifespan19 March, 2005
MediaSD, MMC
CPUARM9 processor at 400 MHz
Online servicesGPRS

The Gizmondo is a handheld gaming console with GPRS and GPS technology, which was manufactured by Tiger Telematics. Launched in 2005, the Gizmondo sold poorly, and by February of 2006 the company was forced into bankruptcy and discontinued the Gizmondo. However some stores including Maplin Electronics countinue to sell the device at a discount.

Functionality and specifications

The Gizmondo includes a GPS module for in-car navigation which could also be used to track player movement in real-time for multiplayer games. The Gizmondo also contains a VGA camera mounted on the rear of the device. It can send SMS/MMS messages and email and can play MP3/WAV/MIDI music, WMV/MPEG4 videos and a variety of 2D/3D games. The Gizmondo can play games, music tracks and movies, take and store digital photos and be used like a mobile phone to send text, multimedia and e-mail messages. It lacks the ability to send or receive voice calls.

The phone service to enable people to send messages is being provided by pre-pay Vodafone accounts bundled in with the device. It can also access the Global Positioning System for use as a navigation aid. There were plans to support a variety of ___location-based services, for example. GPRS and Bluetooth wireless connections were intended to provide multiplayer gaming.

The Gizmondo also had a feature called "Smart Adds." In exchange for a discount on the Gizmondo (of $170 in the US, £100 in the UK), up to three advertisements per day would be displayed on the handheld’s screen. Although the ads would not interrupt game play or other functions of the unit, the user would be forced to watch them before going on to the next function or shutting down the device.

Gizmondo is powered by a 400 MHz ARM9 processor and has a 2.8 inch 320x240 pixels TFT screen and an NVIDIA 128 bit GeForce 3D 4500 GPU featuring a programmable pixel shader, hardware transform engine and 1280KB of embedded memory. The GPU was added relatively late in the system's design, causing some delays for launch titles and the system, as they were redesigned.

The system's appearance and ergonomics were created by industrial designer Rick Dickinson, who worked in a similar role on various Sinclair products such as the ZX Spectrum.

Gizmondo Widescreen

File:Giz widescreen 4.jpg
The Gizmondo Widescreen.

Tiger Telematics planned to release a widescreen Gizmondo in 2006. It was intended to have a larger screen and upgrades like wi-fi and TV-OUT support. The widescreen Gizmondo was announced just a few weeks before the US launch of the Gizmondo, possibly prompting some potential customers to not buy the Gizmondo, and instead wait for the improved model.

The Company

In 2000, Carl Freer had formed a small electronics business in Sweden. In 2002 he quietly merged Tiger with a loss-making carpet retailer based in Jacksonville, Florida, purely for the carpet company's shares, which were quoted on America's pink sheets grey market, which allowed him to have a group of shareholders from whom he could raise finance for his new project. The electronics company would soon be renamed Tiger Telematics with an attempt to take on Sony and Nintendo which seems audacious with an aim at the UK market, the third largest market and relocated at an office near Farnborough Airfield. Stefan Eriksson who Freer had met during a previous business visit was brought along into the company with Peter Uf [1]

The other executives who were employed by the company were: Steve Carroll, chief technology officer; Peter Lilley, who was the head of the company's Smart Adds operation; David Levett, chief software architect; Rich Clayton, the company's US producer; Tamela Sainsbury, corporate secretary; Johan Enander, Head of Security, Joe Marten, investor relations boss and Eriksson's wife, Nicole Persson who was 'marketing and public-relations services officer' for a short period, so was Anneil Freer, the wife of Carl who was paid £100,000 for the same "consultancy services" which included an introduction to the singer Sting, and time spent in connection with the Agaju gaming concept.

In 2004 Eriksson was paid £1.1million by the company with other bonuses that amounted to another £145,000 and also received a car allowance of £5,000 a month. Freer, not to be outdone by Eriksson was paid £1.1million with a chauffeur-driven Maybach and his own Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren despite an 280,000 USD vehicle allowance. Persson was paid £90,000 for 'marketing and public-relations services'for just over one year. However none of the executives seemed to be outdone as Steve Carroll had been paid £800,000 with a company Bentley Continental. The three executives between them own shares of the company amounting to 94 million USD. Carroll's girlfriend, former actress Sainsbury, was paid £78,000 with perks worth £43,000 and a Mercedes-Benz M-Class for a company car.

Marten, received 800,000 shares, which was worth 1.8 million USD before he resigned in 2004 when the board of directors learned that Marten had made an unauthorized purchase of a luxury automobile using the company's funds."

The Gizmondo device made its debut as a concept product known as vaporware at the German CeBIT show in March 2004, when it the Eupopean sibsidisary was known as Gametrac Europe which was later renamed as Gizmondo Europe.

The company became known for its extravagant spending, despite not yet making a profit, let alone getting the Gizmondo off the ground, the company even brought out a model agency ISIS and a share in a racehorse, even if it was known for its poor performance and the company leased a shop in Regent Street in London as its flagship showroom at a cost of £175,000 per annum. The company paid $4m for nineteen game concept work on the hanheld to Games Factory Publishing including a game called Typing Tutor despite having no keyboard peripheral as yet, $5.9m to Electronic Arts to port its SSX and FIFA games and $3.5m to Northern Lights to develop Colors and Chicane which was in fact developed by Warthog and Indie Studios.

The showroom also ran a launch party at the Park Lane Hotel and its own store which spared no expense, paying celebrities at an exorbant sum, the party was hosted by Dannii Minogue and Tom Green, with perfromance by Sting, Pharrell Williams, Busta Rhymes and Jamiroquai. Sting was rumored to be paid £750,000 for the performance. The launch party wouldn't help the product it intended to sell as apart from that, it was known for the game's poor reviews. In an attempt to promote the product, Eriksson competed at the 24 hours of Le Mans in the Gizmondo sponsored Ferrari 360 Modena GTC in 2005 but would retire into the morning with mechanical troubles.

U.K. release

Gizmondo was released in the United Kingdom on 19 March, 2005, initially priced at £140. Units enabled with "Smart Adds" (see below) had a rebate of up to £100. The Gizmondo was available from the Gizmondo flagship store on London's Regent Street, via Gizmondo's online shop, and other highstreet and online retailers (such as Argos, Dixons, Currys, John Lewis among others).

U.S. release

In the United States the Gizmondo launched on October 22, 2005. Retail price was $400 for a unit without Smart Adds, or $229 for a Smart Adds enabled device. It was available only through Gizmondo’s website or at one of several kiosks located in shopping malls. Plans to distribute the handheld through other retailers never materialized.

Controversy

In October 2005, shortly after Gizmondo was released in America, a Swedish yellow-page paper printed a story linking Stefan Eriksson and two other Swedish Gizmondo Europe Executives to the Swedish crime ring "Uppsalamaffian" (Uppsala Mafia.) The paper investigated a six months' loss of 200 million dollars, exhibiting large payouts to later bankrupt entities. Further, the trio's felon history was revealed such as Eriksson's 10-year prison sentences in 1993/94, for, among other things, conspiracy to pass counterfeit currency and attempted fraud, and the fact that Johan Enander was being wanted by the Swedish police. In light of these findings Eriksson and others resigned. One of those resignations came from Carl Freer, the Chairman of the board and a director, who co-owned along with Eriksson Northern Lights Software Limited. Freer, was a frequent-suspect-never-convicted criminal who had previously failed to deliver some stolen cars from Germany. Northern Lights was paid a large sum of money to create Chicane and Colors, two Gizmondo games that were actually developed by Gizmondo Europe itself. Freer paid the money back to Gizmondo in order to stop an investigation into the matter. The Gizmondo company itself denied knowing anything about Eriksson's past.

Enander, nicknamed 'The Torpedo' started his career as a local bouncer at various restaurants in Uppsala and then rose to become the main enforcer and debt collector of Uppsalamaffian. He was sentenced to over six years for a series of violent crimes. In December 2003 he was again sentenced to one and a half years for physical assault on a woman, upon release, he was assigned as Head of security. Another management employee was Peter Uf who was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison for similar charges to Eriksson, namely attempting to defraud 22 million Kronor from the Swedish Bank Giro Central. Uf was the other executive to resign. However, Gizmondo conveniently relocated Eriksson to California for its US launch with question marks around how the felon Eriksson at all could enter the US.

Bankruptcy

On January 23, 2006, the UK based arm, Gizmondo Europe (GE) decided to enter into bankruptcy. The embattled Gizmondo hand held gaming device hemorrhaged hundreds of millions of dollars before filing for bankruptcy: in 2004 Tiger Telematics reported a loss of $99 million, and between January and September of 2005 they lost $210 million. Soon after Gizmondo retail locations in both the US and the UK closed, and the Gizmondo website was shut down. The game development arm of Gizmondo also went out of business.

The company was also involved in various litigation: Swedish Ogilvy Group, MTV Europe, Christian and Timbers landlord to their office, Handheld Gaming and the Jordan Grand Prix all filed million dollar suits.

Gizmondo is currently under investigation in the UK for approximately £25-30 million owed to the Inland Revenue.

On February 21, 2006, Eriksson lost control of a million dollar Ferrari Enzo sports car which he allegedly drove while drunk on the road in California. Eriksson claimed to have been a passenger in the car, but this claim was not supported by forensic evidence there were also rumours there was a gun in the car. The car itself was not owned by Eriksson, but was claimed by the Bank of Scotland during the bankruptcy of Tiger Telematics. Eriksson is currently being held without bail pending a court case due April 12, 2006. It was found that that and two other sport cars were leased in Britain, that lease payments since had ceased after the company collapse, and that after the export, the Mercedes was reported stolen in Britain with insurance pay-out.

The following month in the same week as the Ferrari crash, Freer, Lilley, Levett and Clayton have founded a virtual network operator called Xero Mobile which is similar to business in terms of business model to the Smart Ads. [2]

Games

At the time of the US launch, fourteen games were available for the Gizmondo.

Although more games were in development, the company’s bankruptcy prevented release of further titles. A list of Gizmondo games can be found here.

The most anticipated Gizmondo game, Colors, was never released due to the company’s bankruptcy.

Some dedicated Gizmondo fans have created Homebrew games. Links to Gizmondo homebrew sites can be found below.

Halo?

Halo: Spartan was a supposedly cancelled Gizmondo game that was in pre-production, but was only so to generate stock numbers. It would be another entry into the acclaimed Halo franchise. It was said that it was going to be controlled with the mounted-camera on the Gizmondo for superior FPS controls.

Competition

The Gizmondo competed for marketshare with handheld consoles by Nintendo (the DS and Game Boy Advance) and Sony (the PlayStation Portable).

See also

Reference

  1. ^ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2769-2189659,00.html
  2. ^ Unnamed. "Ex-Gizmondo team form ads-for-airtime phone firm". Reg Hardware.


Other

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