A couple of weeks ago I went to look for a new game for the Playstation Portable (PSP), and was actually quite shocked to discover that I had played just about every old game that was of interest to me. I had recently downloaded the demo of the new Warhammer turn-based game, and thought it was worth a look.

Buying second hand games, going through the back catalogue, I had been paying anything between £10 and £20 per game, which wasn't too bad. But now I was going to have to pay full price for a game with only fifteen or so levels, and even at my slow pace that was likely to be only a couple of week's worth of play.

I realised that I was running out of games, and that the games were going to be very expensive from now on.

I do appreciate the PSP as a technical accomplishment, and it has many strengths over the Nintendo DS, but after less than a year for me it was running out of life. The promised third party developments had failed to materialise, and the prospect of getting any interesting application software looked vanishingly remote.

Sony's decision to neuter Logitech's attempts to create a hardware keyboard add-on to facilitate web browsing looked like one of the final nails in the coffin. That the firmware upgrade required to play the latest games prevents third party game demo downloads looked like another one.

Slowly but surely, the PSP seems to be a dying platform, much having been promised and the little that was delivered arriving too late.

So, I sold my PSP on ebay for £92.

The alternatives are limited. The DS looks better now that the Wii has taken off, but even so the number of games is limited. I already traded my DS for the PSP, so there still aren't that many new games I would find essential - Sim City?

Strangely, the platform where there is the most innovation and opportunity at relatively low cost is in the realm of mobile computing.

There are three primary mobile computing formats as far as I can see

• Mobile phone
• Palm
• Pocket PC (PPC)

A modern games capable mobile phone would be a rather expensive option. The field is fraught with difficulty too, from compatibility and stability issues to simple availability. Games tend to be very poor, with casino, sports and platform style games predominating.

Furthermore, the best mobile phone has a limited technical specification and a small screen. I dismissed this option right away.

The Palm Operating System offers a lot. But the hardware leaves something to be desired. There is little prospect of finding good 3D games on the current iteration of the platform, and there is one annoyance that really knocks the thing into touch for me.

Machines that run the Palm OS have a large area of the screen set aside for a handwriting recognition panel. I don't get on with handwriting recognition. As far as I am concerned the keyboard is the best means of data entry yet invented. I can think at the same speed I type, and my handwriting is terrible!

Even if I didn't use the handwriting panel it would be sitting there taking up valuable screen real estate. Annoying me!

So, I kept coming back to the pocket PC platform.

I had enjoyed the touch screen aspect of the Nintendo DS, and so the prospect of gaming on a touch screen was something I was already comfortable with. Then there is the sheer range of available PPC software, much of which is freeware.

Games can be obtained for only a few dollars, and there are many interesting applications that are of interest to a creative chap like me.

I am less enamoured by the possibilities of PC/PPC synchronisation where emails, internet favourites, contacts and common files are synchronised between the remote PPC and the main desktop PC. I'm not familiar with the software required to accomplish this miracle, but my main objection is that the only time I would be able to synchronise is when I am sitting at my PC anyway, which seems to defeat the purpose.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would I want my emails to be downloaded to my pocket PC when I am already sitting at my PC? Surely, I just deal with them on the PC?

I dunno.

Anyway, so I managed to get what looked like a good ebay deal on a Dell Axim x50v. I was particularly interested in this one because it had a very high specification, amongst the highest currently available.

Dell have stopped making their Axim series pocket PCs, and indeed the whole field is at stagnation point. The new version of the most common pocket PC OS is Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6, and it is really aimed towards the new generation of PDA capable mobile phones. The "classic" WM6 version for legacy PPC hardware is really an ungainly mish-mash that doesn't work very well, as I discovered when I tried to run the Dell.

I had imagined I was getting some kind of bargain. The x50v came out at the time of Windows Mobile 2003, and there was a subsequent official Dell upgrade to Windows Mobile 5. But the version of Windows Mobile 6 that I was running was a third party hack of some sort, and there were obvious problems with it.

The newest version of Active Sync (version 4) would often fail to see the Dell, and although the Dell found my wireless network at the first attempt, it frequently lost it, eventually refusing to recognise it at all.

The problem with WM2003 is that the OS only makes use of volatile memory, which means that when the battery runs out all information is dumped. That means every user installed program and file is lost when the battery goes belly up.

On older devices they actually advise that users keep power cradles available both at work and home to avoid crucial data loss. Now synchronisation begins to look pretty essential, possibly reducing the impact of a crash to the loss of only a single day's work.

The Dell gets around this problem by introducing a portion of non-volatile memory where files can be stored. But still, if power is totally lost all the user settings retained in main memory evaporate. There is a little backup utility, which seems to solve the problem partially, so perhaps the answer is to live with the issue and back up regularly.

Hence the desirability of WM5, which demands non-volatile memory. It uses main memory to run programs, but reads them from storage.

WM6 is simply a slightly enhanced version of WM5.

But I was simply not getting along with WM6, and many others reported similar concerns, even suggesting that WM5 was a pretty poor upgrade for the x50v. There were many who seemed to rate WM2003, despite it's propensity to dump your data.

I managed to find a utility on the Dell web site which allowed me to revert the machine to WM2003, so after a few days of struggling to get WM6 to work I downloaded the utility and ran it without any problems.

Now programs run well, Active Sync stays in sync and my home network is always available. There is an inordinate amount of pleasure to be had from surfing the net remotely (a new experience for me).

I am running several programs that I expect to become firm favourites, and not only games!

There are many creative music making programs, but the one that interests me most is Syntrax, which is freeware but promises to allow for some pretty sophisticated sequencing on the move. Still experimenting with that one!

There's also the very fun Clanger Theramin for making beautiful VCS Synthi-A type sweeps and bleeps.

For playing music there's the built in Windows Media Player, which seems to be just as unintuitive and useless as it's big brother. I'm currently trialling Pocket Music and Mort Player, both of which do better, but neither of which can match my stand alone Archos gMini 400 MP3 player for ease of use.

Sadly, it appears that I will not be able to replace my gMini with the Dell (thereby reducing my pocket gadget overhead). I had imagined that perhaps I could tool up with SD and/or CF cards to match the 20gb of storage in the gMini, but whilst that is a possibility, I simply couldn't put up with the poor native sound quality of the Dell. It's rather on the crunchy side for me regardless of which of the players I use.

I must try a wav file and see if it deals with that better, but I suspect the audio hardware simply isn't of a very high quality.

However, as an audio note taker the Dell is useful. The quality of the recording made by the in built microphone is pretty abysmal, but NoteM records direct to MP3 format reducing the storage required.

Drawing using a touch screen is a viscerally beautiful experience, and both Pencil Box and Vspainter LE produce doodles of sufficient accuracy to satisfy my cack-handed attempts at drawing. There are other more costly alternatives, but these freeware editions suit me fine.

I was also lucky enough (after some digging) to find a very nice Life program. I am a sucker for "run it and see what happens" software, and Life is the very best example of that. It runs fast and it is every bit as powerful as anything I've used on the PC. Watch the little gliders go!

I must have tried a hundred games already, and with my usual percentage hit rate I currently have a dozen or so demos installed. I will probably shell out some actual money at some stage, but I already managed to obtain the full version of Bust'em 2 for free somehow.

This is the bat and ball game to end all bat and ball games. It makes Arkanoid look like a haemorrhoid. The playing arena is not square! The bat is not restricted to the bottom of the screen! Tiles don't disappear, they explode into sand and pile up behind the bat!

The game runs like a dream on the 624mHz processor, and I'm sure the x50v's 16mb of dedicated video RAM is doing good work too!

Bust'em 2 gives any game I've played on the PSP or DS a good run for its money.

There's also Enigmo, which shipped with the machine upon release. It's a water flow management game. Yeah. Water drips, you have to manage it to the exit. 3D, looks great. I like it.

And I have PocketGNU Go, the ultimate portable version of Go. I love Go. It's my favourite game of any kind anywhere. I love the real game, against a real person, and I love the computer version against the machine.

It plays fast too! I may love the game, but I'm not very good. Even though I've been playing for years I'm probably about 12 kyu at best. The machine beats me most of the time, which makes sense, since it is rated at between 12 and 8 kyu.

So, my emigration from the world of the consoles to the world of pocket computing is complete. Even though the pocket PC scene is no longer vibrant (if it ever truly was), and the devices themselves are impenetrable to most people, I think I have made a good choice that will keep the demon of boredom firmly locked in the dungeon for the foreseeable future.

Maybe.