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EA Sports is well known for its extensive sports game library available for most video game systems.  Never have we seen an EA Sports game title on the Palm OS or Pocket PC though.  Until now that is.  Mobile Digital Media Inc. will be distributing this years Madden NFL 2005 game that has been ported over to the two most popular handheld operating systems.  While at a New York tech show this week BargainPDA.com editors got a chance to play this upcoming game and have some screen shots to share. The game is not yet announced, expect to hear something official by the end of the week.

Here, running on the palmOne Tungsten E, we see the team selection menu for starting an exhibition game on Madden NFL 2005 (view large image)

After deciding on a matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and the New York Jets the Jets kick off (view large image)

What the heck?  First touch of the ball and our chief editor uses the Bengals kickoff return man to burn the Jets special teams and return the kickoff for a touchdown, it's Bengals 6 Jets 0.  Realism factor? Zero.  Fun factor?  Ten. (view large image)

We were quite impressed by the graphics, there's some scaling going on to give a true field-of-depth perception and the colors are vibrant on the palmOne Tungsten E screen.  You have to love the fact the true team logos and colors are in the game too.

Playability suffers a little though, mainly because the button layout on a Palm device is not designed as a game machine.  You'd need a control accessory to be able to play a game such as Madden 2005 with ease, having two buttons on either side of the D-pad is a pretty tough gaming experience when more than two buttons are required to perform all of the actions that can take place in a game such as Madden. The buttons can be remapped though, and the version we played was not the final build.

All the same, we're thrilled EA is forging into the game arena for the PDA world.  The video game market is huge, and we're sure there are a number of people out there that will enjoy seeing popular sports video games translate over and become available on a PDA platform.  Madden 2005 will be released next month, it can be purchased on an SD card and the price will be $39.99.  Click here for update pricing on Madden 2005.  We'll have a full review of this game in the upcoming weeks.