I have a Toshiba e330 and it plays games fine. The only games it doesn't work well with is things like PocketQuake and the PocketSNES emulator. PocketQuake is a little slow and PocketSNES is
very slow. If you want to play a game like Argentum (a good strategy game) or any other game, it will run fine. As for playing mp3s, the built-in speaker is not very good, but if you plug in some headphones, it will sound just fine.
As for eMbeded C++, this is a stand-alone version of Visual C++ that is just for mobile devices. (PocketPC, H/PC, Palm-size) It is very much free

(yes, there is a free Microsoft Dev product) and will handle any program you can give it. I might add, it works great with GapiDraw and is the only thing you can use to develop PPC apps (other that some .NET thing I don't know about.)
Hope that heleped. It was kinda long
