Yup.
Always wanted one of these.
I know they were popular in Europe as well.
The day I got mine, I installed LittleJohnGP (the NES emulator) and GPEngine and threw some roms onto the thing before heading to my Grandmother's restaurant, which was a good 45 minute drive in Houston. I can't tell you how cool it was to play Ninja Gaiden in the car at full speed, it was honestly mind blowing.
The best thing about the GP32 was the community, it had real synergy with the Dreamcast Homebrew of the time, and a lot of experiments with cross-compatibility using homebrew link cables was done. The thing had an official SDL port! That made writing code for both it and the dreamcast a snap. I remember a killer port of Beats of Rage was released on the thing.
I always cringe when I hear the average person talk about the Ouya because I know they'd speak the same way about the GP32. To me, the Ouya grew way bigger than it was intended. Seemed obvious to me that the Ouya was supposed to be the next homebrew platform, a place for those who had dinked around with the GP32 and Dreamcast and GP2X and all that stuff to continue. People looking at the Ouya like it was supposed to be the next Playstation TV would have been like people looking at the GP32 like it was supposed to be the next GBA. Very different demographics, definitely not for everybody. As is, the GP32 is probably my favorite handheld of all time.
I had a QD, no more side talking and a bigger screen.
The games were kinda fun too. I never regretted getting one.
Someone stole it from me though :'(
The later N-Gage games, the ones that mainly weren't released in stores and only sold on the Nokia website (because stores gave up on the N-Gage in the first year) were quite good. Mile High Pinball and High Seas are probably the best games, followed by Glitterati. There are 2 ports of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and both are pretty good actually, with the 3D one, surprisingly, being the best of the two, not the side scroller.
I'm also partial to the 3D remake of Snake, which is unironically one of the best games on the system. Also, given that nearly all anime at the time was distributed in realmedia format, the built in real player was actually pretty useful for me. I remember you could rotate the display with a homebrew app to maintain the aspect ratio by just turning the entire unit on its side. I actually like the shape and feel of the QD, although the original Taco model really is awful.
I find the N-Gage fascinating, it's like a train wreck you can't turn away from.