It’s the beginning of the year, so the Consumer Electronics Show is currently in full swing in the awesome city of Las Vegas. The thing is though – there’s so much, pardon my Dutch, crap being announced it’s hard to keep up. I have yet to see a single interesting thing to come out at CES so far, and I have little hope the next few days are going to be any better. That NVIDIA mobile gaming thing is mildly interesting, but as usual – no price, no release date. The Verge is spending loads of money on CES, so it has excellent coverage going on. Let’s have a contest: if three months from now any of you can name three products announced at this year’s CES (without cheating), I will force myself to use iOS for a week.
The high powered gaming consoles rarely do well, the only two hand helds that have done quite well are the various incarnations of the gameboy and the DS, both by nintendo.
Don’t think of it as a competitor to the 3DS – think of it as one of those cheap, Chinese emulation handheld devices with some serious horsepower underneath. This’ll be like a GP2x on steroids, and it has an HDMI port. I might actually be able to play Smash TV at full speed on a portable device, with two analog sticks. Personally, I can’t wait
They’re also showing off a sweet looking 10″ Visio Android tablet with Tegra 4 that’s lighter than the Nexus 10, and actually running stock Android 4.2. If you’re tired of only having Nexus Android devices to choose from, this is a big plus.
Seems that companies like Visio and Nvidia are actually pimping stock Android as a feature now. I can see companies going forward putting ‘we stopped crippling Android with our shitty bloatware’ as a bullet point on the boxes of their phones and tablets
Not only that but they always ignore the fundamental problems, which is who in the hell wants to do fancy 3D gaming on an itty bitty screen, that the controls on the handhelds just don’t do those kinds of games very well, and that powerful GPU equals lousy battery life.
Frankly the only consumer tech I’m looking forward to checking out would be the PS4 and Steambox which from a hardware standpoint ought to be quite interesting as the PS4 is using an AMD APU and the Steambox an Intel i3 and Nvidia GPU so for the first time since the original Xbox you are gonna have consoles built out of bog standard X86. From an OS standpoint it ought to be interesting, especially if someone can hack the systems, as they could make for cheap HTPCs. I know I hung onto my original Xbox for a few years past its EOL simply because with XBMC it made a heck of an SD media player.
There’s also the issue of massive production costs related to making these types of games. With the majority of consumers only interested in $0.99 – $1.99 mobile games these days, it’s almost impossible for any studio to release a game of substance (gfx & gameplay wise). Even mobile gaming powerhouses like Nintendo might be forced to cheapen their gaming experience to cater to cheap customers. Blame that retarded bird-throwing game.
Oh, fwiw, some of the best gaming experiences I’ve had have been on handheld devices, particularly the GBA and DS.
Careful. Sony might send you to prison for it.
Edited 2013-01-08 02:08 UTC
Yes but those systems not only had games designed around their strengths but weren’t trying to push heavy graphics which as you noted can be VERY expensive and as i noted equals battery life measured in minutes.
I’ll always remember the Sega nomad which IMHO was the first real attempt to bring home console quality into the portable realm (since it was just a Genesis shrunk down) which everybody thought was a great idea…until they found it would go through 4 times the batteries of a GameBoy for the same amount of gaming time.
The simple fact is until we come up with some breakthrough in battery tech so you can feed these monsters, or come up with some GPU tech that lets you crank out Borderlands II level graphics while using GameBoy power these things aren’t gonna take off, nobody wants to carry around a wall wart looking for an outlet or carry a device that will be dead for most of the day.
Don’t you count Sega Game Gear? It was just a Sega Master System shrunk down…
…yeah, it also ate batteries for breakfast.
Even GameBoy can be seen as somewhat batteries-hungry, in comparison to such http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brick_Game.png dedicated tetris games that were quite popular in places.
Original PSP?
According to wikipedia, ~71.4 million units sold as of Sept 2011.
IIRC the NeoGeo was huge in the east. I’ve never used one though, so couldn’t comment on it’s performance / hardware.
Also the original PSP had some success – albeit not as all encompassing as Sony visioned (eg those movie disks for the PHP were largely a flop).
On the whole though, I think you’re right. Most of the successful mobile platforms have been the least cutting edge (just look at how big those Java phone games were).
If I had to guess, I’d say most people aren’t interested in cutting edge graphics nor sound on a mobile gaming device because it’s hard to create the environment to play in (noisy train stations / being lurched about on a bus / etc).
Laurence,
“(eg those movie disks for the PHP were largely a flop)”
Yea well with the crummy state of HTML5 in those early days, who didn’t see that one coming.
🙂
hahahaha *blush*
Not so sure that the home console version was ever huge even in the east, in the arcades the Neo Geo did very well but the system was very expensive for home users.
As for the handhelds, I think it’s mainly a question of Nintendo having an iron grip on that market more than the pricing.
Back when the Gameboy ruled we had Bandai trying to aggressively compete with the Wonderswan and later the Wonderswan Color, SNK with the Neo Geo Pocket/Neo Geo Pocket Color which were as I recall, priced competitively, but to no avail.
The PSP is probably the only success story in handheld consoles that didn’t come from Nintendo and it’s obviously still nowhere near the DS. PSP Vita was off to a very slow start but seems to be picking up, 3DS is way ahead though.
Here are the japanese hardware sales for 2012 and the total sold (again, in Japan):
Nintendo 3DS: 5,727,763 units (total 9,762,502 units)
Nintendo DS: 286,270 units (total 32,864,129 units)
PSP: 941,992 units (total 19,179,100 units)
PS Vita: 674,365 units (total 1,077,159 units)
Wii U: 638,339 units (total 638,339 units)
Wii: 492,999 units (total 12,667,420 units)
PS3: 1,327,185 units (total 8,744,333 units)
Xbox 360: 67,273 units (total 1,588,011 units)
Of course the big problem for the dedicated handheld console is the increasing competition from smartphones/pads.
There is perhaps another success story – really dedicated handheld tetris consoles (like this one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brick_Game.png ). Do we count those?
Pricing definitely played a role in their uptake (basically an order of magnitude less expensive than even Gameboy) …”unfortunately” they were cloned all over the place, came from many small manufacturers, so nobody was keeping count of the total numbers sold (of nearly identical units, really).
As far as personal anecdotes go: they were much more popular than Gameboy at least in some of the less affluent areas (Central Europe in my case – so that’s still relatively prosperous, there are many less affluent places)
Edited 2013-01-12 21:08 UTC
“Huge” is not the proper term… home console version of NeoGeo had something better described as smallish enthusiastic following, AFAIK.
NeoGeo Pocket saw some success, relatively wide adoption in the east …but it wasn’t high powered, so the rule stands.
And consider that the most popular portable game of all time is probably still Tetris… not only for Gameboy and such, also on inexpensive dedicated tetris handhelds (like this http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brick_Game.png ), quite widespread in less affluent places.
There is another category of handhelds which did quite well – LCD games with just one game. That includes, yes, Nintendo Game & Watch and its clones …but also dedicated tetris handhelds (like this one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brick_Game.png ). They were quite popular in the 90s in less affluent places (I suppose they might be still easily found in Spain); cloned by many small manufacturers, so numbers aren’t really known, it’s all anecdotal.
And yes, they also demonstrate that low powered gaming consoles do better.
Edited 2013-01-14 22:27 UTC
I don’t mind if CES is a place to show off wild ideas and go crazy with concepts. If some of them make it into final devices then that’s great, if they don’t, then it probably wasn’t a viable idea in the first place.
If anything, I think OEMs need try to think outside the box a little.
I still want a SmartBook, 2009!!
So, then why didn’t you bought Toshiba AC100?
Also, modern Chromebook X303 could be qualified into this category.
Yeah sure, running Android or ChromeOS, the two crappiest OSes for desktop computing.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/TEGRA/AC100#Files_to_download
I’ve been running XBMC for a long time (and XBMP before that).
Nothing beats a console controller with the XBMC interface for queuing up music while hosting a party.
Much easier than trying to use a laptop or even using XBMC on Android via touch.
With a pair of Bluetooth speakers, this will be awesome for parties.
Are you going to use iOS for an entire week exclusively? So no computers, TVs boxes, consoles or any such hardware? (I guess we wont/cant count TRON/iTRON and all those similar machines, since then it would be no cars, microwaves and such and might make life troublesome i think)
If that is the case, it might be worth studying up. hehe.
The Tegra 4 was the big announcement and could be pretty sweet in the successors to the Nexus 7 and 10 (though whether Asus and Samsung make those is up to debate). Of course, it happened on the very day I finally got to order a Nexus 10 (the UK Google Play Store has been out of stock 99% of the time since its launch).
The Nvidia games console will fail (screen is too small for one thing), though including a Tegra 4 and having access to Google Play games (I assume it does!) are actually smart moves that the Ouya and Gamestick completely fail at.
The YotaPhone – see http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/yotaphone/4505-6452_7-35560814…. – is an interesting dual screen idea, but why on a phone instead of a tablet? A 4.3″ screen is too small for comfortable e-book reading, IMHO and also with two glass screens won’t you be twice as likely to break a screen when you inevitably drop it?
No, CES was a bit dull – I think the excitement will come later in the year with new phone and tablet announcements with improved hardware (no doubt Qualcomm and others will come up with something to rival the Tegra 4). Galaxy S4 phone, new Nexus models etc.
Uh, CES has not started, and even if it had, it certainly isn’t one day long.
I guess the ePaper screen is rather meant for rich, energy efficient notifications and clock/callendar.
Being able to read them any time is one of the thing I miss most in my old Nokias.
Thom, three months from now, have a happy 2007.
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(please ignore everything below this, I hadn’t pen and paper nearby so I am using osnews.com for taking notes)
Vuzix M100 smart glasses
Nvidia Project Shield
Huawei Ascend Mate
Easy.
Xperia Z.
Xi3+Valve “Piston”.
Fitbit Flex.
Have fun with the stitched leather (you like it, you masochist!).
“The thing is though – there’s so much, pardon my Dutch, crap being announced it’s hard to keep up.”
The company I’m employed at is at CES, and everyone in the consumer electronics buiness considers CES a great crowdsourcing opportunity, not a release stage.
That’s why you see so much “crap” and stuff that’s obviously far from production.
Lego Mindstorms EV3.
I can easily think of three products worth remembering. Top of the list is the Fuji X100s. I want that camera more than I’ve wanted any gadget in a very long time. The Fuji X20 is not quite what I’m after still a decent and memorable camera. Finally there is the Sony Xperia Z, probably going to end up being too expensive for me, but 1080p, quad-core, waterproof phone is hardly a forgettable phone.
Get ready to dust off that iPhone
The Fuji X100s was one I’d noticed too. My girlfriend has its predecessor the X100 and it’s a fantastic little camera. It’s hard for me to get too excited about existing cameras being refined and tweaked though.
Try Microsoft Mira