My GP2X F-200 arrived yesterday, so now that I’ve had some time to play with it I thought I’d post up my initial impressions of the device.

Price
I ordered the console from Play-Asia for around £83 plus £17 UPS delivery. I decided to pay the extra for UPS so I could track it’s progress and try to be at home when it arrives.

Delivery
Despatch and delivery was very quick. I ordered on the 29th and delivery was attempted on the 1st (3 days later). Unfortunately there was an unexpectedly large customs charge attached which I wasn’t able to pay at the time, so the console had to be delivered again on the 2nd.

All in all I was pleased to order from Play-Asia but would probably not pay for UPS again. I would recommend UK customers to either go for standard delivery or purchase from a UK stockist.

Packaging
The packaging is of very high quality (better than DS and PSP boxes) but I was somewhat surprised to find the GP2X at the very top of the box with the screen facing upwards. Despite the thickness of the box, it’s possible that a well-placed sharp impact during transit could damage the console. Fortunately Play-Asia had further padded the package using bubble wrap.

Console build quality
The GP2X seems to be of great build quality, on par with the DS and PSP. The plastic is thick enough and the finish doesn’t seem to attract finger prints like my black PSP.

The buttons feel responsive and I was happy to see that the button names are engraved instead of printed, so they can’t rub off.

Despite carrying a couple of AAs, the unit doesn’t seem unusually heavy for its size. It appears to weigh a little less than a DS (using my highly scientific method of holding a console in each hand and swapping a couple of times).

The directional pad
One of the redesigned features of the GP2X F-200 is the directional pad. The 4 major directions are buttons in their own right instead of being joined together as one solid piece of plastic like the DS or PSP (or pretty much every controller ever made).

If you normally press the pad near the outside it can be quite uncomfortable to switch directions or press diagonals. The buttons are quite sharp near the outside and have some resistance to being pressed. However, if you keep your thumb in the centre of the pad buttons, the pad becomes much more comfortable and responsive. Pressing diagonals is then quite easy due to the size of the direction buttons.

The stylus
The pen which comes with the GP2X is telescopic and metal. It doesn’t feel like it’s of good quality at all, it feels brittle even, and the pointing end is too large to use with any precision. I would recommend using a Nintendo DS pen instead, as the GP2X pen is really quite nasty.

Unlike the DS, there doesn’t appear to be anywhere inside the GP2X to store the stylus, so if you want to take the pen around you’ll need to attach it with a string (classy) or keep it in your pocket.

The screen
While the pen seems cheap, the touch screen itself is completely the opposite. Colours are vibrant and the viewing angle seems quite large for most applications.

I found that movies or games with dim colours or low contrast tend to have a more shallow viewing angle. Cave Story’s gloomy backdrops don’t always stand out very well, but Sonic the Hedgehog’s bright colours are very clear indeed.

The OS
The F-200 comes with GamePark Holdings’ latest GP2X OS - version 4. As I’ve never owned a previous version of the console I can’t say what the differences are, but I can say that this version is rather amateurish.

Each section of the OS has a different layout, which makes using the device unnecessarily difficult. The graphics are very poorly drawn, to the point of being unpleasant. To add insult to injury, navigation is clunky and unresponsive, as buttons presses don’t usually have an immediate effect on-screen.

Each time you turn on the GP2X, the OS takes about 20 seconds to start up, which seems inexcusable compared to the lightning quick boot times of the PSP and DS.

All in all, the OS is a pain to use and I can’t wait until there’s a way to bypass it.

Video playback
One of the reasons I bought the GP2X was to watch movies and TV shows on the bus. I tried a couple of different DivX/Xvid movies and was very impressed by how smoothly they played back. The image was of very good quality given the 320×240 screen and subtitles were clearly readable.

MPEG movies don’t seem to be playable from inside the OS but perhaps there’s a 3rd party player.

Software library
I’ve only tried a few programs, but I’ve been very impressed so far. Some programs are apparently incompatible with the new hardware/firmware but I would expect many of them to be sorted pretty soon. MAME, for example, has already been fixed.

The F-200’s speakers