Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Monday 10/12/2001

The rumours have coalesced into facts: Amstrad is launching a new Spectrum. Well, not really. But it is launching a new e-m@iler phone after Christmas, and it will have a Web browser and a Spectrum emulator. Already, scanned pictures from catalogues are on the Net and the details are fleshing out: £120, pocket Internet Explorer, looks much like the old e-m@iler but a bit curvier and more silvery.

Amstrad has also been busy registering Web sites with names like spectrumgamescentre.com. Downloads of games will cost up to 50p a pop, apparently, although I don't know how they intend to stop people going to the existing sites where thousands of games are available for nowt. And Spectrum fans can be frighteningly good at unpicking software, so if Sugar has put some form of electronic locking on the machine he should expect it to be in pieces in double-quick time.

Expect pronouncements from the man that this is the greatest Amstrad gizmo since the PCW word processor. I don't think so: this is one man's obsession, not a company-saving miracle. But I'd love to be proved wrong.