Razer Announces Micro-Console Running Android TV

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• ezridah - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link

  I hope this uses Nvidia's Tegra K1, allows steam streaming, and supports Bluetooth controllers. I've been waiting for a Shield console ever since the Shield came out.

• Krysto - Friday, June 27, 2014 - link

  Yeah, and I hope they make another version next year with Denver/Maxwell at 16nm FinFET.

• tviceman - Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - link

  I would also love to see Tegra K1, but the price needs to be right. Razer isn't known for releasing price-competitive products. Amazon Fire TV costs $99, so if Razer can come in at $149 with Tegra K1 that would be a great price point...but $199 would be too high.

• Krysto - Friday, June 27, 2014 - link

  I agree on pricing. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd rather pay $50 more for the latest cutting edge mobile chip in a micro-console than get last year's chip. I hope it's not just Tegra K1, but Tegra K1 with Denver, so it has ARMv8/64-bit support, and push more games to be optimized for ARMv8 and more advanced graphics APIs.

• Ortanon - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link

  I miss Google TV's HDMI-in. Without it, Android TV is just an Amazon Fire TV Google Experience Edition. It adds nothing and fixes no problems (well, I guess it does give Android console games a home).
  
  Essentially what should have happened, instead of a Fire TV Google Experience Edition, is an Xbox One Google Experience Edition -- basically Google TV with better software -- featuring a content API that they successfully convinced Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/et al to use so that the Google search feature actually provides meaningful results.

• HisDivineOrder - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link

  If this were built around Shield-like hardware with support for Gamestreaming (or better yet Steam's own streaming), they could have a real hit here.
  
  Especially since Steam Streaming has gotten everyone interested in a cheap client for running streams.
  
  If they resist their constant urge to overcharge by crazy amounts, they might have a winner here.
  
  If nVidia were savvy, they'd sell a Gamestream client for use with all Android devices that uses the mpeg4 decoder on just about every modern Android SOC to further sell more cards and leave Shield to its high end niche for MAME and other emulators.

• Ortanon - Thursday, June 26, 2014 - link

  Well, they'd probably want to use MPEG-H over MPEG-4, but yeah we get your point.
  
  The problem is: game streaming is probably only exciting because it's still rare. Once the novelty wears off, I'm personally not convinced it will remain relevant.
  
  Over-the-air, it's kind of a fun idea but really not all that important and inherently has a lot of drawbacks.
  
  At home, it just means you don't have to move your box around the house. Tell me: how many TVs do you think most people have? How much moving around are you doing just to play a game? Wake me up once the virtualization piece settles in and game streaming no longer means the host box is unavailable to someone sitting right in front of it.

• HisDivineOrder - Monday, June 30, 2014 - link

  Seems like you have:
  
  Living room, den, kid room 1, kid room 2, your bedroom, and your home office potentially all with a computer and/or TV.
  
  All of which might enjoy having the option to play a game. Imagine you buy a headless gaming server you install in your office. You wire your home with gigabit and you get to focus all your budget not on making decent-but-not-great gaming HTPC's for each room (or some rooms), but on the most amazing hardware you can put together (and still save some money) on that ONE gaming PC.
  
  Then you buy $99 Tegra K1-based game streamer clients. You play your games in any room, but all the heat and noise can be in another room entirely.
  
  The promise is there.