OUYA Android-Based Game Console Starts Shipping

The Kickstarter-backed company to produce OUYA, an original game console built around Google's Android Linux-based operating system, is beginning to ship their developer consoles and SDK.

OUYA came around earlier this year with great success on Kickstarter for promising a $99 USD Android Game Console. They planned to start shipping in December and they were successful.

This shipping news was shared via a blog post from the company at Ouya.tv and was entitled "It's Open Season!" The "Dev Console" package includes the console itself, two controllers, an HDMI cable, micro-USB cable for interfacing the console with a PC, and the power adapter.

Shipping now are the initial developer consoles while the proper launch of OUYA is expected to happen by the middle of 2013. The initial OUYA game console is running Google Android 4.2 and the hardware is based around NVIDIA's Tegra 3 platform. Sadly by the time the console begins to formally ship, it will already be outdated due to Tegra 4 Wayne and the ARM Cortex-A15 destroys the Tegra 3. With the Tegra 3 SoC is 8GB of flash-based storage, 1GB of RAM, USB 2.0, HDMI, and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi. It's nice for the $99 price-point, but isn't too exciting otherwise.

So far there's just shy of two dozen confirmed games for OUYA, a Super Nintendo emulator that's forthcoming, and a handful of other software projects have confirmed their intentions to port to the Android-based OUYA.

While the OUYA is nice for its very low price-point and being based upon Android/Linux, I remain not too excited about the game console. I don't see the current-generation OUYA as upsetting to the current console gaming marketplace. Valve's Linux-based game console is going to be much better and I personally have no plans to buy an OUYA although I wish the company the best of luck.