Tegra3 quad-core processor
1GB RAM
8GB of internal flash storage
HDMI connection to the TV, with support for up to 1080p HD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth LE 4.0
USB 2.0 (one)
Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad
Android 4.0
Also an SD card slot, don’t know why that isn’t listed.
An open console, inviting indie game development, hacking, at a $99 price point? Running Android? I dig the controller, too. I’m intrigued.
I popped in to grumble about how it would be too expensive, but $99 is actually a pretty good deal. If it can run regular apps, too, (as it says it can at the bottom of the page) then it seems like it would make the Nexus Q pretty much redundant.
I can still see an appeal in the Q with just the ability to let everyone bring their music and play DJ (especially since it can easily run Netflix and other apps now), though there’s certainly a lot of overlap. Especially with this guy in the arena, the Q needs to drop in price fast.
But I’m really psyched about the Ouya. I think it’s a great idea, and yes, I pledged. They’re insisting that all games come as a free download, which is rather a double-edged sword: Devs will have to get creative to monetize their games, but it’s great for consumers. I just hope it gets the love from devs that it deserves.
I’m also curious how near to stock it is-- if standard Android apps work without modification (provided they have support for non-touch input), then it’s just about an instant buy for me. If developers targeting ‘Android’ have to do something special to their code to enable, say, a fallback d-pad-and-enter-key mode for the controller, then it gets significantly less compelling.
It does run on a Tegra 3 chip, though, which means I could stick MX Player on it, and that means I basically wouldn’t need my Google TV box until I actually bother to get some sort of video input to put in the back rather than just getting all the TV I watch from the Internet.
I know that either on the Kickstarter page or at Engadget I read that all existing Android apps will work, although there’s no Play Store to download them from. Basically has to be sideloaded, but existing apps should run just fine – the controller has a touchpad.
Well, I’m just not convinced by a hardware Kickstarter. The software industry is so diverse and fragmented that anyone can just enter at will, and it’s still possible for just a couple of people to produce a quality software product. But I think you need something more closely resembling legitimate funding to compete with hardware.
Four of the ten top projects have been hardware. The Pebble watch was even something on roughly the same scale as this-- a hardware platform for software development.
Yea… I don’t know. On one hand, I like the concept, but on the other hand my phone has better specs in every single way and is smaller. If there was a level where I could buy just the controller I’d be a lot more interested.
But that’s native game development. I’m talking about emulation, which always requires multiple orders of magnitude faster hardware than what is being emulated.
Though searching around, I guess there are some N64 emulators for Android, but I have no idea how well they work…
And, given that it’s their first day and they’re $325K from their goal, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the machine get a lil better architecture than they’re currently stating. Also, their big push is for OPENNESS. No big thing to pop in more RAM or flash a Jelly Bean ROM, even if it doesn’t ship with it.
