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If I was looking to do some hand held demoing what platform would you advise and what tools? I'm a C coder and I know OpenGL. Don't want to spend huge amounts of money on hardware or software. Performance/popularity of the device isnt an issue (or age). Just something good an easy to setup and get going with.

Maybe an emulator is the best route, if so what and why?
Maybe you want to get rid of some kit you no longer use?

I should add, it doesnt need to do OGL , raster software graphics is fine.

There is no such thing as a unified "handheld gaming" platform. There are only devices. Most devices run in some sort of crippled subset of the OpenGL standard (if at all), so what you learn on one device is completely irrelevant on another.

I'd suggest you start by downloading the latest iPhone SDK which has OpenGL support right there in the emulator.

I found the devkitpro stuff for Nintendo DS pretty easy to use, once it was set up. There is a tutorial for integrating it with visual studio, which IIRC is easy to find with google.

If software rendering is your thing then just pick a S60-phone from Nokia that runs 3rd Edition and you're all set. The emulator is shit though.

So is the handset ;-)

(can't wait to ditch my N95 when my contract renews)

You do know there are quite a few different handsets running S60? :) The very first N95 was not that good, but after a firmware upgrade (or three) it got decent. The N95 8GB is very good though. Same goes for the E51.

TBH, myself and my work colleague have both had the same experience.

We both swore by Nokia phones for years, switched to Sony when Nokia's phones went all odd, came back to Nokia and hated it.

I just think Sony have done a much better job with the user interface on their phones.. i've had a play with a couple of other recent Nokias as well as my own. Oh yeah, the black N95 *is* better than my one, but i'm still going back to sony.

GBA's are cheap to get, have great homebrew support (same's DS, mostly) and have very good emulators (nocash, mostly). at least i was amazed by how easy i got set up devving for gba and it all working (thanks to graga).

I am into gamepark and also NDS lately. I found NDS pretty nice and easy to program.

I'd say GBA. The emulators are good, the tools are good, the hardware is cheap, and it has a rather big homebrew-community. As skrebbel points out it's very easy to get set up, four-five lines of code and you have pixels on screen. NDS is closing in, but the emulators aren't quite there yet and there's still a bit much fragmentation in the community.

yes, definitely the gba for old rasterization methods. great development tools and support (communitywise)

the linux based gp2x is also great if you want a bit more punch (2 x 200mhz ARMs), and well supported by its community. you get to use sdl to fuck with its buffer, but no 3d hardware (which i see as a + anyway)

GBA is a good choice, emulators are readily available as well as development tools. Nowadays it is also very cheap to get the hardware (GBA+flashcart).

Plus, the clowns need a bit of ass-kicking these days.

Yes. Those who have tried so far have done very poor attempts at kicking ass.

I seem to recall something about "Cornelius Matthew" or something.. dunno.. oh well.

windows mobile, evc, gapi

GP2X has been so far the easiest to start with. No hassle with modding or adapters and the dev tools are pretty much the same as on any Linux. A big improvement over GP32, which was a major pain in the ass to set up.