Commodore Android Phone: A victory of hype over substance

CommodorePETPhone
The Internet is ablaze with the news of a “Commodore” Android handset that plays all your old C64 and Amiga games. I really don’t get the hype.
OK, I do understand how the hype might help to sell a few handsets. There’s no word relating to an actual Australian release for the phone, which has a current US list price of $300. It’s likely that at least one of the grey importers (take your pick) will import at least one “Commodore” handset to sell here.
At current exchange rates, US$300 equates to around $400 Australian. Add in a little GST and a premium for the importer, and at a guess you’d be paying around $500 for a “Commodore” Android phone with a 5.5″ 1920×1080 display, 1.7 GHz Mediatek 64-bit octa-core processor and 13MP rear camera. Not bad specs on the surface, but equally nothing really groundbreaking at this kind of price point.
The hype, of course, doesn’t relate to the specifications, but to that Commodore badge and the prospect of playing C64 and Amiga games on the handset, which is labelled as the Commodore PET, reaching even further back into Commodore’s history.
The thing is, this particular phone has as much to do with Commodore as my rubber duck does, or will do the moment I print out a Commodore logo and slap it onto his ducky behind. Commodore as a company is long since dead, buried, revived and dead yet again. Those of us with nostalgic mindframes might decry this — I very much enjoyed my time with the Commodore Amiga that saw me through my university career and more than a few games of Speedball 2 — but it’s the truth.

So much nostalgia. So many broken bones.

The Commodore PET will ship with two preinstalled emulators on board; VICE for C64 emulation and Uae4All2 for Amiga emulation. Which is nice and all, but if you already own an Android device, they’re not exactly hard to find.
Here’s VICE on Google Play
And here’s Uae4All2
Given that the current “Commodore” are preinstalling both emulators, you’re also potentially cutting yourself off from Google Play upgrades to the apps, depending on where they’ve sourced them from.
Either emulator would be great if all you want to do is muck around on workbench or write scrolling “Hello World” style programs on the C64’s interface. The chances are that if you’re keen on either emulator, it’s for gaming style purposes.
Therein lies the rub, because it’s entirely likely that the Commodore PET will ship with no games preinstalled whatsoever, which means that you’ll have to import them yourself. Which, again, if you installed those emulators on any other Android device, you could do with exactly as much grace as the Commodore PET will manage.
Except, within Australia, not legally at all for most C64 or Amiga titles.
Yes, even if you do still own the original disks or tapes.
This is a subject I’ve written about numerous times, but I always seem to end up referring back to my piece over on Lifehacker about it, which you’ll find here. The short form is that current format shifting laws quite specifically call out games as something you’re not entitled to shift to newer digital formats without explicit permission covering every aspect of the software, from sound to art to code, end to end. There are, it’s fair to say, a number of genuinely “free” C64 and Amiga titles — but they’re probably not the ones you’re thinking of. Odds are, the companies that produced them no longer exist, either.
No, I’m not stupid enough to think that this will stop anyone for long, and realistically the odds of being pursued for decades-old games code for which the ownership path can in itself be rather murky are rather remote.
Still, given the choice of buying a phone from a known vendor and dropping a Commodore emulator of choice onto it — and maybe a Commodore sticker if you really want to go the whole hog — or spending $500 on an unknown quantity just because it carries a name but no other concrete history with that company — I know which way I’d jump.
Frankly, for that kind of money you could very easily pick up either actual system, a joystick and indulge in some proper nostalgia… and still have enough money left over for an entry level Android phone or two.

4 thoughts on “Commodore Android Phone: A victory of hype over substance”

  1. Shayne Tilley

    Speedball 2 — I loved that game…
    I’ve never understood emulators it’s like du-tuning your brand new Porsche so it drives like an 80s volvo. I understand the nostalgia factor, but to me that’s with the old joystick, white box and monitor or it’s shallow and a different context.

    1. There can be a convenience factor — faster load times, larger selection and no dud tapes/disk reads — but agreed: without a joystick, a lot of the best games will only be marginally playable via tap selection.

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