Wanted: Wiz Review


WoD

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Ahoy Guys!

It looks like lucky customers got their Wizzes before us journos, so I would greatly appreciate it if anyone is up for volunteering to write an in-depth review of the Wiz hardware for publication at: http://www.gadgetoid.com/channels/pandoragp2x/

The same goes for any software, if you want to help promote the console and its titles then please give me a shout.
 
ninjawiz2x posted on May 27 2009 at 05:42 AM said:
Id say ask fluffy , shes the 1st that comes to mind .
Haha, I started one, but I got extremely busy. I'll see what I can do. :D
 
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I know I'm going to get booed off the site for this, but I suggest DaveC. He's very meticulous about details and is pretty picky about everything, but I think that readers will be able to see for themselves what is and isn't important to them.. better to have someone who hits everything hard than someone who glosses over a lot of things. He also isn't in any way partial to something like the Dingoo over Wiz, so no one can criticize him the way they have craigix.
 
If I had a Wiz I would've done a review for you. Oh well.

But yeah, I can agree about DaveC - he knows his stuff.
 
Thanks for the responses, hopefully someone with the time will turn up and crank one out. One would hope that most of the people I would consider to be the best and most knowledgeable candidates are far too busy developing/porting software to write a lengthy article at the moment!

Still, your brief reviews and videos are welcome- I could compile something together and publish it and, of course, YouTube videos/unboxings never go amiss.
 
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.
 
Unfortunately, from what i gathered from your review is that there is almost no functionality improvement except for flash (which you did not mention) for anyone who owns a gp2x at this point in time. I read in another thread that since they removed the video decoding hardware in this followup to the gp2x chipset the video playback is actually worse than the gp2x (as in higher resolutions not supported). Not only that, it doesn't support other codecs that may be useful to certain people like what the dingoo does (rmvb, mpeg, etc.).

Of course, the form factor and build quality are both things that makes me want to buy this handheld (like when I bought a Gameboy Micro or DS lite). The internal battery is an improvent compared to the GP2X. I really liked the fact that the GP2X used AA at the time. However, I have really only used this capability twice during plane flights. The GP2X flimsy battery contacts became flattened. The battery rattled around and I had to replace them! The internal battery is an improvement also because you actually know when the battery is going to fail unlike AA's guesstimating.

But without any extra features compared to the gp2x, it is not worth it in my perspective at this point in time. Especially since it supports less games and emulators currently. There is more future potential for the Wiz (except for video decoding), but it is currently not a great deal.

Also, does anyone know if the video playback can be improved in the future? The only reason at the time I bought the gp2x was because I could watch videos without transcoding. If the Wiz can never achieve this, I will be dissapointed (why did they have to remove the decoding hardware? WHY???).

On a side note, I wonder if pandora can decode videos as well as the gp2x. Since video playback was never fully addressed to my knowledge. The complete lack of any alternative media players for the gp2x that is worth anything also does not bode well for additional codec support coming from any open source sources for either device. I still cant play wmv or rmvb files on my gp2x. The dingoo is good in this regard but it lacks the pandora's screen size or the Wiz's screen quality.

I will eventually get a GP2X Wiz. Just not anytime soon, seeing as how I have no income currently and am playing Street Fighter 4 nonstop.
 
It was only a very quick brief kinda review like WoD asked in his last post. I could do a full review but I think someone else would be a lot more objective than myself. Maybe Pete could do one?
 
Nice overview WarmFluffyUK.

I'll probably hold off buying a Wiz until I read more reviews and that screen tearing issue is worked out.
I dont quite yet feel justified in buying a Wiz as a replacement for my GP2X, but a new gadget is a new gadget...

Damn new gadget envy!
 
Even without any decoding hardware, Wiz (with firmware 1.0.1) can decode .avi files quite well (most common-compressed video files now can be played without re-encoding for lower resolution). And it will be better with any further firmware upgrading.

I believe you can be relieved at least about that ;)

EDIT: Type
 
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I just got my Wiz today. I ordered it from a Canadian distributor and so it is definitely a production unit. I've already field stripped it to catalog the components, check the PCB revision and see what has changed since the rev4 prototypes. There are several changes for sure, mostly with the charging circuit and power on/off management. Overall, it's a pretty solid design. The components look to be from reputable manufacturers and the design makes good consideration for efficiency and battery life.

Rev6 has three LEDs under the power button light pipe (which is new). The red appears to be connected directly to the battery charging chip as it operates while the system is off. I think someone said the light turns green when charging is done (which I haven't tried yet) and there is a second output on the charging chip for that so those two new LEDs are probably tied directly to the hardware. Only the blue LED is connected to the system so no fancy lighting effects are possible, but you barely see that light anyway. :) There's a new chip for control of the power button probably to make sure the system can be brought down even when the kernel is all locked up and it definitely works well as I have found many times today.

I tried many different programs, basically anything I could download from the forums. I shouldn't comment too much on that with everything being new but things sure do lock up a lot and require a power cycle. Even some things right in the menus gave me grief (like trying to record with the built in microphone). The touch screen was way off but after a calibration, it was good (though not responsive to the very edge as others have found). Unfortunately after some power cycles, when I had to use it again, it was way off. Perhaps I should look into the next firmware revision. This has 1.0.0 of course. I think I will leave that for another day.

Anyone who says the screen tearing isn't noticeable is flat out lying. Any time a menu changes or a game scrolls, you can see that line. It's not the end of the world and you can play through it with no problem, but I don't see why anyone would pretend it's not there.

The OLED screen is nice and bright and I am enjoying the viewing angle and quick refresh but I probably built it up in my head a bit more than I should have. I can't say that it blows me away but not washing out at large angles puts it ahead of the GP2X right there. I made sure to look for those horrible stuck pixels and missing pixels but thankfully I don't see any.

I did notice a real discrepancy in the luminosity between pixels. When using that T-Mode feature to check out the colors, I assume the white/green/blue/red screens are supposed to be one solid color but what I see is slight variances all over the screen. Every pixel is not the exact same shade as the ones around it so it's like a big mosaic effect using one color. Does that make sense? Is this normal? Do I have a bad screen or is this just how it is? It's not something you can really detect in a game because there are different colors all over the screen so it's more of a technical nit-pick than anything else. Still, I am always looking out for 800x480 OLED panels and stuff like this is disheartening if the technology still has this limitation everywhere.

I can confirm the dpad does have a pivot, but it's not deep enough. All four buttons press down quite easily and that's why they made the software ignore four simultaneous presses. I find in some games that I get a right detect when I want to press down, but it might be more that the buttons are just small for my thumb size. I'm not a huge fan of the broken dpad for ABXY buttons either. I feel like I'm playing with egg shells trying to get the right one without mashing on a bunch but again that might be because I find them a bit small. I also would have preferred the shoulder buttons to be hanging over the edge like the GP2X had.

The speakers are nice and loud. Each 8 ohm speaker has a dedicated power amp behind it capable of being driven at somewhere between 400 and 600mW (depending on what voltage they are using). The headphone amp puts out a respectable 44mW per channel for decent levels in normal headphones. The noise floor of the Wiz is very impressive (just from listening tests) and system noise doesn't creep into the audio stage. Maybe eksasol can run this on his audio analyzer to get some actual numbers. ;)
 
Well to fully appreciate what the OLED does you need to try games with allot of black in them like older arcade titles. Things like vectors and starfields look far better than an LCD. As far as the pixels it is normal for these to have a sort of light texture noticeable mostly in solid colors, it is not defective. Just like there are grades of LCD so are there grades of OLED. High end OLEds (like the Sony $2500 11" TV) do not have this texture but as you would guess those are a higher cost right now. I don't seem to have too many problems with crashes during games. The most common one I have is the bug some emus have that lock up on exit.
 
Ah yes, that is a good point. The contrast ratio is unmatched on OLED. The blacks are true black. Thanks for the confirmation on the variance too.

I get some stuff that locks up when loading (stays on loading screen forever), some stuff that has no way to back out (that I've found with all the combo press attempts that are typical) and other stuff that hangs on exit as you mentioned Dave. More testing and releases will come out I'm sure.

I still can't get a MAME game to run. Either I run out of memory (I assume this because it seems to load all the bits and then just stops) or it tells me I don't have all the files! Both are on me though because I don't doubt the emu works.
 
Ah yes, that is a good point. The contrast ratio is unmatched on OLED. The blacks are true black. Thanks for the confirmation on the variance too.
I get some stuff that locks up when loading (stays on loading screen forever), some stuff that has no way to back out (that I've found with all the combo press attempts that are typical) and other stuff that hangs on exit as you mentioned Dave. More testing and releases will come out I'm sure.

I still can't get a MAME game to run. Either I run out of memory (I assume this because it seems to load all the bits and then just stops) or it tells me I don't have all the files! Both are on me though because I don't doubt the emu works.

You are most likely not using the correct MAME ROM sets. You need to "find" the correct ones to work, it is based on an older MAME for speed, new ROMsets will not work.
 
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