Here's a very quick review I wrote during breakfast, not in depth but more of a skim over the Wiz:
My first impressions when unpacking the Wiz was that is was quite tiny, I knew from pictures it was going to be thus but I really wasn't prepared for how small it was going to be, and very light too at only 137g weighed on my kitchen digital scales with an SD card inserted.
The case is very solid. It's smooth and shiny with a slight speckled pattern (almost like faint marble) making fingerprints less visible. All the main buttons on the face of the Wiz have a soft click feel to them while the Left, Right and Volume buttons are standard click micro switches. All buttons are very responsive but the volume buttons are awkwardly placed at the bottom left of the case, I would have preferred them to be a bit larger if I'm honest.
The SD card inserts at the top of the unit and protrudes exactly 1mm, which for me isn't a problem as so far I have never accidentally ejected it. Charging and connection to PC for data transfer is all done with a single supplied USB cable which plugs into the bottom middle of the unit. Unfortunately the Wiz does not have a standard USB connector so if you forget or loose your cable you will not be able gain access to the internal memory (NAND). GPH are also going to be selling a mains charger for the unit, but you can always buy a compatible mobile phone charger that does the same job,
THIS CHARGER is what I currently use to charge from the mains. The Wiz does not have any networktivity such as WIFI, Bluetooth or Infra-red built in, which is a shame but I hear there's a docking station in the pipeline that may have WIFI built in.
So how does it perform? The Wiz boots in 17 seconds to it's standard orange themed launcher or desktop (Whatever you want to call it).The menus are very easy to navigate and it's pretty obvious where you should be going. I'm not really going to test this with emulators of ports or Quake alike because this isn't really a fair test as emu's and ports are still at early stage and are not yet optimized for the Wiz. But saying that, Quake, Doom and MAME run very well indeed, sound is a bit choppy but I reckon that will improve with updates.
Okay on to the the screen: It's an impressive AMOLED touch screen, very bright and viewing angle is superb, being that it's based on OLED technology means the screen has no backlight making the colours very rich with deep blacks, and reducing the weight of the system. This is the first hand-held console I can say is truly portable, as I can practically use it almost everywhere and still see the image. Not in direct sunlight, but everywhere else including in the shade. I will mention the viewing angle again as this is such an amazing point, I loved GPH's previous console (The GP2X), but for me I hated the screen, tilt the console slightly and the whole thing changed. This is never a problem on the Wiz, my boyfriend described it as watching a mini animated bright poster, which is a very good analogy.
I think the size may be an issue for some and myself I found one or two games a little annoying on the small screen, such as Elevator Action on MAME but it's still very playable. A problem I found though was the touch screen wasn't very accurate even after calibration, another thing GPH are going to fix in a future firmware release.
One big down point: There is a diagonal tearing issue on the screen which can become incredibly annoying, I noticed it instantly when playing Quake and is visible on games that scroll the backdrop, most games will not be effected but on ones that are effected it annoyed me a lot. GPH have a work around that developers have to adhere to and they have said they are trying to fix this in firmware, I hope they do as it's very noticeable in certain games.
The battery seems to last forever and so far I have not had to charge it very often, I would say the Wiz will outlast my original PSP in this respect, and makes the original GP2Xs battery life a joke.
One thing GPH are pushing with the Wiz is the ability to use it as a media device, video, audio, pictures, e-books and Flash etc. So far it performed well although I had to convert videos to get smooth playback. Audio played OGG and MP3 files but would not play back any WAV files. Flash was a bit hit and miss as most of the downloaded Flash content played but without audio plus slow frame rates, Fishy was a good example of this as it was just playable and didn't have any audio.
Overall the Wiz is a nice little machine let down by a few issues such as the screen tearing. Hopefully these problems will be addressed and will help to make the Wiz a perfect little games console for those on the go, mine now never leaves my side.
Clare Jonsson.
