Gamestop has the GBA Micro on sale for $50. Nice deal if you never picked one up. The battery life is a bit short (3 hours or so) and the screen is on the small size, but the sharpness/brightness of the screen is awesome and you can't beat the extreme portability. And the GBA has a massive catalog of great games. It ain't a dead platform yet....

http://www.gamestop.com/productmerch.asp?groupid=721

You might be wondering, "Why would I buy a GBA Micro when I already own a DS/GBASP?" Well, you'd buy one if you were a gadget/Nintendo junkie like me...or if you simply wanted a portable gaming device that's so small it can fit in your shirt pocket. Plus, I hate playing GBA games on my DS. Somehow it just doesn't feel right. I always bust out the GBASP with the new brighter screen when I want to play some GBA. The only downside to the Micro? It won't play legacy Game Boy games like the GBASP will.

I'm not sure why the Micro was such a flop for Nintendo, but it's obvious that it wasn't nearly as successful as they would have hoped. The main reason may be that the big N oversaturated their own market. There just wasn't enough demand for yet another version of the GBA, especially when the DS would play GBA games as well. Also, I think they marketed it badly - they stuck the thing in a really juvenile looking package and made it look like a toy in the US. If they were trying to appeal to the iPod crowd, they needed to stick it in a slick looking little box - which is exactly what they did in Japan (I imported a solid black Micro from Japan). Why they chose to go a different route in the US, I'm not sure.

It's a bummer the Micro never took off, though. I was looking forward to a lot of support for the thing in the way of new faceplates, but that never happened. It was obvious the Micro was a flop just a few months after release, when Nintendo refused to announce or comment on any new faceplates or other accessories. Oh well. Anyone know if any third-party companies ever released some cool faceplates? I passed on the FFIV box set that came with a Micro faceplate...kinda regretting that now.