Twenty Years of Handheld Gaming

Portable consoles have come a long way since their introduction in the late 1980s — compare the Nintendo GameBoy, released in 1989, with Sony's 2005 PlayStation Portable. The advancement is staggering, though it took a bit of time to get there. Generally screen sizes were small, blurry and monochrome (unless you could tolerate a battery life of around only two hours to power a color screen) until around 2001, when Nintendo's GBA was released.

PocketGamer.co.uk looks at the notable portables throughout this period of gaming evolution comparing screen size, screen resolution, initial price, horsepower and physical size. Unfortunately some of the more unique systems, such as NEC's TurboExpress and SNK's NeoGeo Pocket, are not included in this comparison, but you still get an idea of how the technology has advanced and evolved through the years.