Microtek PlayGo

The PlayGo is a handheld gaming console created and marketed by Microtek. Released on November 26, 2004 worldwide. As a seventh generation console, the PlayGo primarily competed with Sony's PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS.

Hardware
The PlayGo has a sleek appearance. The console sports a 4.3-inch 320x240 TFT LCD panel. The console has four face buttons (A, B, X, Y), a direction pad, an analog stick, and other buttons. Also on the front are two holes for the speakers. On the top, the console has two shoulder buttons and a microUSB port. On the left side, there's an SD card slot, while on the right side, there's a GoCard slot and a power button. On the back, there's a battery slot.

The console has a 266MHz ARM926EJ-S Freescale i.MX21 processor, combined with a custom, proprietary PolyCore 3D graphics hardware engine. The graphics engine handles the graphics capabilities of the console. It's capable of rendering over a million polygons per second. It supports OpenGL ES 1.0. The graphics chip supports texture compression, anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, and many other features. Despite the slower processor that's used in the console, it performs on par with Sony's PSP at a target frame rate of 30 fps.

The console features 64MB of system memory, with 4MB of seperate eDRAM for video memory.

The console features Wi-Fi,, Bluetooth, and USB 2.0 connectivity.

The console has a 1400mAH battery, with an option for 1800mAH and 2000mAH battery, which it can last for 3 to 5 hours in gameplay, 6 to 8 hours in video playback and 8 to 10 hours in music playback.

System software
The PlayGo runs on an in-house operating system named qOS (internally oneOS). It features multimedia capabilities (audio/video playback) and internet capabilities. The handheld is capable of playing the following files: For the web browser, it uses NetFront as the main browser. Due to the memory limitations of the console, only 2-3 tabs can be opened at once. Adobe Flash Lite applications are supported via a software update. In addition to that, YouTube and online videos that are encoded in RTMP/RTSP can also be played through the Media Player application.
 * .MP4 (MPEG-4 Simple Profile and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Main Profile)
 * .AVI (either MJPEG or XVID or MJPEG)
 * .MPG (MPEG1)
 * .WMV (Windows Media Video)
 * .WAV (Linear PCM)
 * .WMA (Windows Media Audio)
 * .MP3 (MPEG1 Layer 3 Audio)
 * .AAC (MPEG 4 Audio)
 * .JPEG
 * .PNG
 * .GIF
 * .BMP
 * .TIFF

In addition to the main operating system, other ARM-compatible OSes, such as Linux can be installed. Microtek offered a version of Linux called qLinux, which was sold either via online or mail-order. The version of Linux is free of charge.

The console natively supports OpenGL ES 1.0 out of the box, due to the use of the PolyCore 3D hardware accelerator. Various software-based graphics rendering engines, such as HI-CORP's MascotCapsule, Fathammer's X-Forge and Raylight's BlueRoses Engine were ported to the console. In addition to that, an in-house graphics rendering engine, known as PolyForge was also released to developers.

Games
Since its release, over 914 games were developed and commercially released for this system. Typically, games that are released for this system are distributed in either via GoCard or digital download.

Notable games include SSX Out Of Bounds (EA Sports Big), Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars (Rockstar Games), Need For Speed Most Wanted (EA), Call Of Duty 2 (Activision), Resident Evil 4 (Capcom), Devil May Cry 3 (Capcom), Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (Ubisoft), Saints Row Pocket Edition (THQ), BioShock (2K/Indiagames), Guitar Hero 3 Portable (Activision), Peggle (Popcap), Asphalt 4: Elite Racing (Gameloft), and Amnesia: Mobile Edition (Frictional Games).