The Red Jade was

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in informat ...

's unreleased handheld console, intended to compete with the

Game Boy Advance The (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld game console developed, manufactured and marketed by Nintendo as the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, in North America on June 11, 2001, in the PAL region on June 22, 2 ...

History

Development

Fredrik Liljegren Fredrik Liljegren, also known as Fredrik Liliegren, is a Swedish programmer and businessman. He has worked at RedJade and co-founded the studio Digital Illusions and the demogroup The Silents. Early life and education Liliegren was born in Lund ...

founded Red Jade as a

startup company A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

in February 2000. The startup included other notable developers such as

Robert J. Mical Robert J. "RJ" Mical (born 26 January 1956) is an American computer programmer and hardware designer who has primarily worked in video games. He is best known for creating the user interface, Intuition (Amiga), Intuition, for Commodore's Amiga ...

. Originally the developing team for the Red Jade approached

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

and

Sega is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega Europe, are headquartered in Irvine, California and London, r ...

as potential partners but both declined. Ericsson decided to invest US$10 million in the Red Jade, It was to be released by Christmas season 2002 and would have retailed for $150.

Cancellation

When overall sales plummeted, Ericsson cancelled the Red Jade before production in April 2001 and cut 22,000 employees to help minimize losses. The collapse of the

Dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

left the startup in a position where it was unable to find other investors to continue development. The number of existing

prototype A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and Software prototyping, software programming. A prototyp ...

units is unclear along with possibility of games made for them.

Quake III Arena ''Quake III Arena'' is a 1999 multiplayer-focused first-person shooter developed by id Software. The third installment of the ''Quake'' series, ''Arena'' differs from previous games by excluding a story-based single-player mode and focusing prima ...

was said to have received a port. Ericsson's mobile phone division later divested into joint venture with

and rebranded as Sony Ericsson, until Sony acquired Ericsson's share and became

Sony Mobile Communications Sony Mobile Communications Inc. ( ja, ソニーモバイルコミュニケーションズ株式会社) was a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1, 2001, as a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Ericsson. I ...

. In 2006 Red Jade as a company would be restarted by Liliegreen to operate as a game development studio.

Specifications

The Red Jade which was supposed to have PDA functions, wireless connectability, DivX movies, cell phone capabilities, a

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a Radionavigation-satellite service, satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of t ...

server,

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

audio playback, a web browser, the ability to download games from the website, game sharing utilizing

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

technology, and graphics equivalent to the

PlayStation is a video gaming brand that consists of five home video game consoles, two handhelds, a media center, and a smartphone, as well as an online service and multiple magazines. The brand is produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment, a divisi ...

Nintendo 64 The (N64) is a home video game console developed by Nintendo. The successor to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, it was released on June 23, 1996, in Japan, on September 29, 1996, in North America, and on March 1, 1997, in Europe and Au ...

. The system used a 32-bit or 64-bit

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

processor 3D polygon graphics were said to possibly be handled by an

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

chipset. Graphics were displayed on a

TFT LCD A thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD) is a variant of a liquid-crystal display that uses thin-film-transistor technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in cont ...

that supported 65536 colors. The system used multi-channel PCM audio.

technology enabled wireless communication between 2 or more machines The system was powered by a

Lithium-ion battery A lithium-ion or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery which uses the reversible reduction of lithium ions to store energy. It is the predominant battery type used in portable consumer electronics and electric vehicles. It also se ...

References

External links

CNN article about the Red Jade
Handheld game consoles Vaporware game consoles Sixth-generation video game consoles Ericsson MIPS-based video game consoles {{videogame-hardware-stub