PLAY SPECCY
GAMES ON
YOUR PHONE...
With Amstrad's new
E-mailer Plus!!!
If you find it a chore cranking up your emulator -
or even your old Speccy itself - when you want to enjoy some classic 8-bit
gaming, Amstrad's new E-Mailer Plus could be the perfect solution.
For not only does the £99.99 state-of-the-art digital telephone answering machine allow you to send and receive email worldwide without the expense or complication of a PC - it also gives you access to an extensive library of classic Sinclair ZX Spectrum games.
To enter Sinclair heaven, E-Mailer Plus owners simply choose the game they wish to play from a menu and download it to their machine. Each game is downloaded separately and is stored in the E-mailer Plus for a fixed time period.
Several games can be stored at any one time, allowing you to swap between your favourite games at the touch of a button. There is already a large library of games to choose from, and new ones are being added all the time. And the best thing is that once downloaded, you can even play games while a phone call is in progress!
The cost of downloading a game is 12p for an hour's trial and 50p for three days, plus the cost of a local call, and these charges will show up on your telephone bill. You can password the phone to stop your kids running up huge bills, but sadly you can't download free games from the Web. That is, until some clever SpecChums decide to address this problem!
With Amstrad boss Alan Sugar pumping £8m into promoting the E-Mailer Plus, the chances are that you will being seeing a lot of it - in the UK at least - in the coming months.
Following a high profile press launch at the beginning of February, on 4th March 2002, Amstrad embarked upon its first major TV advertising campaign for 5 years. As this is written, it is still running, and will do so for a total of eight weeks. The first ad aired in between the much-hyped 'Being Victoria Beckham' documentary on ITV1 at 9 pm, which must have cost Amstrad a pretty penny!
The series of TV ads feature ‘Union Jack Man’ (TV presenter Henry Cole), who urges Brits to get online with the tag line, 'Come on Britain, your country needs you'.
There is a single thirty second ad and six additional ten second ads, each demonstrating a different function of the E-Mailer Plus, from surfing the Internet to playing Sinclair ZX Spectrum games.
Yes that's right - they are using the fact you can play oldie games like Manic Miner as a major selling point!
**STOP PRESS - 2005 UPDATE - YOU CAN NOW BUY AN E-MAILER FOR A FEW QUID ON EBAY!!! **
