Wiz - The Unwrapping by Pea

The Wiz arrived yesterday - very exciting. Felt like Christmas all over again! Nothing was officially boxed, but came wrapped in loads of bubble wrap in a compact box.

The box contained:

Wiz (with seperate A/B/X/Y buttons)
Breakout board
USB power cable to breakout board
EXT Connector cable from Wiz to board
Serial cable from board to PC
First impressions of the Wiz

Nice and compact. Screen smaller than anticipated - I knew the screen size (2.8″), but compared to the device itself it looks small because it doesn’t take up much of the face (especially compared to my iphone!). Build quality is very tight. Buttons are very springy and respond with hardly a push. Smudges very easily, especially the sceen.

Impressions of the Wiz running

Boot time is impressive. I had heard a figure of 36 seconds, but it is more like 16 or 17. After flicking the switch, shutdown is 2-3 seconds. The menu behaves pretty badly, sometimes crashing when making a menu selection, and sometimes not responding to clicks (even though the sound plays). The ‘close’ button doesn’t respond to touches (X button only). The file browser also hung when trying to browse the SD card. The screen is very bright with high contrast and pretty much unlimited viewing angle with no colour shifting.

First impressions of the Flash Player

Since I have no applications yet (I’ll be trawling the ‘beta testing’ board shortly to grab some!) I could only test Flash. I chucked a couple of our Flash Lite games (Rune Mage, Old Skool and Magic Beans) on the SD card and cranked them up.

Remember that this is the old Flash Player (Flash 7) and GPH is working on a new one which supports Flash 8 and will hopefully perform a little better.

The games booted and ran fine (I was surprised they did so out-of-the-box). Our Flash Lite 2.0 version of Rune Mage crashed while building the first level, but the Flash Lite 1.1 version was fine. Performance is around that of our higher-end Nokia mobile phones.

An annoying quirk of this Flash Player is that it doesn’t buffer button presses consistantly. For example, if the player is running a little slow, and you tap ‘Left, Left, Left’, the game would usually catch up and move left three times after a second or so. On the Wiz, this didn’t seem to happen all the time (only intermittently).

I will be following this up with more posts shortly, including video of the Flash Player running, and some proper benchmarks comparing the flash player with other devices!