Curse of the iPhone copycat: Ainol's gaming, entertaining V2000
With the iPhone knock-off merchants have been given a whole new design language to copy for their no-brand phones, media players and tawdry games consoles, and latest to bruise our eyes is Ainol's V2000, a PMP-cum-retro-gaming-handheld.
To give it the tiniest of praise, what's inside the V2000 – while no iPhone, and in fact lacking cellular capability entirely - isn't half bad. AVI, various MPEG formats and RealVideo are all catered for, making the most of that 3-inch screen, while it can also handle mp3, WMA, APE and FLAC-lossless music. Should a moment of inspiration come upon you (perhaps fitting a small tumble dryer into an iPhone case?) then the voice recorder might be handy, with the FM radio rounding things off nicely.
Game-play is handled by a preloaded emulator for Nintendo's NES and SNES, the Sega Genesis and the NeoGeo, altogether bringing more than 10,000 titles to the handheld. You can plug in external controllers for group gaming, though huddling round the V2000 itself seems a bit ergonomically suspect.
Storage is via SD, with the V2000 compatible with cards up to 4GB in size, and driving the whole shebang is a 600MHz ADI Blackfin chip. It's unlikely to make it outside of China, so book your flights now if you want to get your hands on one.