|
|
|
History
The Amstrad E3 E-Mailer is the evolution of the 2002 Amstrad E-Mailer Plus. See the Amstrad E-Mailer Plus article for more information.
Release
Released in 2004, the Amstrad E3 E-Mailer added many feature to the Amstrad E-Mailer Plus including videoconferencing. To support such feature, the screen was upgraded from a monochrome screen to a color touch screen. The storage space was increased from 35 blocks to 50 blocks and the games were also repackaged in order to take up less space. The cost of renting the games stayed the same : 50p for 4 days or £1 for 4 weeks.
The E3 also feature a controller that was packed-in with some release of the E3.
Demise
Only 450,000 E-Mailer (all 3 models included) were sold and it took Amstrad more than a decade to recuperate their investment. On April 30, 2010 the Amserve E-mailer service was transferred to BSkyB, who announced that the Amserve e-mail service would close from June 30, 2011. On the day of the shutdown, a new configuration change was made available and stayed available only for 2 weeks (until July 14 , 2011). All phones that didn’t receive the update then deactivated themselves stop functioning.
Games
As for the Amstrad E-Mailer Plus, the E3 had lots of games divided in five categories :
- Arcade / Shoot ’em Up Games
- Arcade / Platform Games
- Action / Adventure Games
- Sport / Simulation Games
- Puzzle / Strategy Games
Within each category, a number of games could be downloaded. With new games were being added from time to time. We weren’t able to find a full list of games, but here’s the one we have confirmed:
Space Invaders (2 blocks)
Star Wars (3 blocks)
Silkworm (6 blocks)
Missile Defence (1 block)
Alien Syndrome (5 blocks)
Pheenix (1 block)
Hostile All-Terrain Encounter (3 blocks)
Galaxians (1 block)
Space Raiders (? blocks)
Crazy Cars (? blocks)
Jetpac (? blocks)
Donkey Kong (? blocks)
Scrabble (? blocks)
Ms Pac-Man (? blocks)
We do suspect that the games available for the Amstrad E-Mailer Plus were also available for the E3, but we were not able to confirm this.