Anyone who has even a passing interest in video games will be aware of the Japanese giant Nintendo. The company has been at the forefront of the video-game industry for a long time and pretty much owns the handheld gaming market with its Game Boy products.

The Game Boy has been around for over 10 years and has gone through a few changes. It started life as a rather large, monochrome device that needed four AA batteries to get it going. It was then shrunk down into what was called the Game Boy Pocket, drawing its juice from two AAA batteries.

Finally, it evolved into the Game Boy Color, which, as its name suggests, is a colour version of the Game Boy Pocket.

Now, however, Nintendo is finally putting the original Game Boy out to pasture, and replacing it with the Game Boy Advance (GBA).

This represents a complete redesign from Nintendo. Previous Game Boy units had a vertical orientation with all the controls located below the screen. The Advance is horizontally orientated with the controls on either side of the screen.

Button it!

To the left of the screen is the eight-way digital direction pad along with the Start and Select buttons. To the right of the screen are the A and B buttons, power light and mono speaker.

Left and right shoulder buttons sit at the top of the unit, and at the bottom you'll find the on/off switch, headphone socket and volume control.

Here's the technical bit...

Even though the exterior styling is impressive, it's the technical specification that's really important. At the centre of the GBA is a 32bit RISC CPU running at 16Mhz. There's 32Kb of on-die memory along with 96Kb of VRAM and a further 256Kb of WRAM.

On the big screen

After the processing power, the next most important thing is the screen and this is where the GBA scores big points.

The screen measures 62mm x 41mm and sports a resolution of 240 x 160 pixels. There is no backlight, so you'll need an external light source to see it.

The image produced by the display is excellent, and you can use it in most lighting conditions.

Graphic detail

The GBA's graphics are incredible for a handheld device, rivalling what you would have expected from a home console a few years ago. Although it has no true 3D acceleration, the Advance does support the rotation and scaling effects that were pioneered by the 16bit Super Nintendo console.

The built-in mono speaker produces reasonable sound, but you need to use headphones to get the full aural effect. The stereo sound and music help to immerse you in the gaming action.

It's all in the game

The game cartridges slip into a slot at the rear and are about half the size of previous Game Boy packs. The Advance is also completely backward-compatible with original Game Boy games, so you'll still be able to play all your favourites.

Unfortunately, these games protrude from the top of the unit, spoiling the aesthetics slightly. Because the original Game Boy had a smaller screen, the older games don't fill the GBA's screen by default, although a press of the left shoulder button will expand the image to fill the screen. Sometimes the expansion looks fine, but at other times it looks stretched.

Located above the screen is the link cable port. On the original Game Boy this enabled two people to link their machines to play together as long as both units had the game cartridge inserted. Things have improved considerably and now up to four machines can be connected together.

But what's really impressive is that with some games, only one machine has to have the cartridge installed.

Life Boy

So, has the handheld market caught up with the home console arena? Well, not quite. There's still a pretty wide gap between them, but on the whole, the Game Boy Advance gives mobile gaming a welcome new lease of life.

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