[genbattle]

I completely agree on the specs; a Tegra3-based platform has more than enough grunt to deliver a "game console" experience for the sort of indie and free-to-play games this platform will attract.

The only thing i'm concerned about is whether they can get even the hardware they've committed to in a $99 budget. Consider that this has the same hardware as the HTC one X, but without the screen, battery, and 3G connectivity. So they have to not only get the Tegra3 for $99, but also the case and power supply. Even if they manage to get those parts down to $99, they still have to add the controller, which will need it's own processor/controller to track and send the inputs over bluetooth to the console. Not to mention the cost of the controller hardware itself, particularly the touchpad.

The other thing that worries me is the Android base. Is the OS still going to lock code to using the Dalvik/Java-based API? If so then I have no hope of creating any games for the platform in my favourite language, Go. What about native-development, new experimental native game engines or languages? Hopefully they'll open the platform up a bit in this respect and allow some native development through a C API or something.

I definitely hope they pull through and deliver on this project, although I can imagine it not making it's way down to the southern hemisphere very quickly, if at all.

[wmf]

Another way to look at it is that it's the same hardware as the Nexus 7 minus the screen, battery, camera, etc.

Android has supported C (and Mono and Unity) for about 18 months, so those complaints are obsolete.