Game gears were so huge I don't see how they could be considered portable.

Although they were a revolutionary. Nintendo didn't come out w/ its color handheld until after the colored cases, and after the lol virtualboy.

That's not revolutionary, it's evolutionary. It was only natural to assume that one day handheld game systems would no longer be displayed in green monochrome, just as television sets evolved from black & white to full color.

On top of that, the GameGear's display was too far ahead of its time. The backlight washed out all of the definition and blurred the entire display when the game was in motion.

Handheld technology must move at a slower pace than console technology because of the issue of cost and the overall effectiveness of the hardware. It's a lot harder to design and manufacture a cutting-edge handheld than it is to design a cutting edge console. A console can be the size of a truck and nobody complains about it. A handheld as big as you head, however, isn't going to really draw you in for the purchase, now is it? Nintendo released the GBA close to a decade after the GameGear, yes. However, the screen is damn-near perfect, the processor is substantially more potent, the unit itself is a fraction of the size and the price is a drop in the bucket. Nintendo kept us waiting for a longer period of time, but by doing so, they gave us a near-perfect product at an extremely reasonable price. As opposed to the GameGear, which strived to be too advanced too soon, and what we got was a shoddy, oversized handheld with pathetic battery life and a pricetag nasty enough to kill a boar.

The fact that it took Nintendo so long to release a color-display handheld was a good thing. They got it right, while Sega jumped the gun and screwed it up.

I thought the Gamegear was pretty sweet, I actually played it more than my gameboy, it was just too fucking huge to carry around.

I do believe that the Gameboy Color had...color before the GBA.

No shit.

I never noticed that. I did notice that the if you looked at the screen from a side angle, the visibilty and the colors would get screwed up though.

Suggesting that the GBA was the first Nintendo handheld with color.

You can't very well compare the two at all though. Ya Nintendo got it "right" because they waited 10 fucking years for the technology and development to be able to make such a great handheld. Thats like saying Oh, the Snes was a worthless P.O.S. if Nintendo would have waited 10 years they could have released a much more worthy system like the PS1. At the time the GameGear was the own. The only thing I didn't like about it then was the battery life. It wasn't much bigger than a damn Xbox controller.

Uh...yeah. That's exactly what I just said. Nintendo waited and got it right. Sega jumped the gun and released a bulky, overpriced, flawed piece of electronics.

No, it's not the same thing. Did you not understand when I explained the difference between console technology and handheld technology? Do you need me to repeat it again? It doesn't matter how bulky a console is, it doesn't matter how much power the thing drains, and the display quality is a non-factor because you hook it up to a TV. When designing a handheld, all of those things are important factors. You can't develop a massive handheld with a flawed screen and 3 hours of battery life and call it a solid product. Handheld technology needs to be a few steps behind console technology because it's harder to emulate current-day console technology in a palm-sized piece of hardware.

That's still too damned big. You needed a backpack to carry the thing around.