I never bought the original Gameboy Advance. I got to play my friends, for a while. Which held me over. By the time that I was ready, and able, to buy my own, the SP version was coming out. So I bought a GBA-SP. And I still have it to this day. My coworker had a second job at the gamestore. So it was cool, as he's the one who got us into the Gameboy Advance. He talked like 12 employees at the job we shared to all go and buy GBA-SP's. Even the Manager. So we would make trips to the game store when we knew he was working. And what was cool was, he would let us take used GBA-SP games out of the case and play them on our own personal GBA-SP's. We were allowed to play whatever we wanted, as long as we stayed inside the store with it. So that was awesome, as I got to play a lot of games that I would never of gotten to play otherwise. That's what really got me into handheld gaming. Playing a ton of games, that I ended up liking, for free. Which got me to buy a ton of GBA games. And, he got my our other coworkers to buy a bunch of games, and even link cables, and we would all play at work, when we were supposed to be working. Good times.
But yeah, that got me into handheld gaming, and then the DS really got me hooked on handhelds. That said, I still have my GBA-SP. I had the blue one. I loved the small clamshell design. It fit well in all of my pockets. So that was awesome. It still works. All of my gaming systems still work. Even the original Gameboy, and all of the way back to the old Commodore 64, and everything in between then and now. So, to answer the question of how many I went through... just one. With all of the wear and tear that I had with the game, it still works as if it's brand new. So just the one.