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Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over verification - James Gordon Bennett
3G, ARM-powered gaming console emerges
BRAZILIAN OUTFIT Tectoy S.A. has partnered with mighty master of 3G chipsets, Qualcomm, and spawned the world's first 3G gaming console, the Zeebo.
This pauper's console is the love child of Reinaldo Normand, a Brazilian entrepreneur come journalist, and Qualcomm. It's built on the latter's MSM chipset and is targeted at emerging markets with bulging 3G networks, like China and Brazil. The firm estimates the market for the console should total some one billion gamers and its grand debut is set for April in Brazil, followed a couple of months later by the US.
With the footprint of an A5 piece of paper, the tiny console harbours the same chipset as HTC's Dream, albeit with some extra features thanks to available real-estate.
Zeebo uses a 528MHz ARM11 CPU, Adreno 130 graphics and an ARM9 DSP for communications, together with 160MB of RAM and 1GB of NAND Flash for storage. The video output is 640x480 (4:3) via RCA with PAL-M (Brazil's TV standard) and NTSC. Expansion is achieved via an SD Card slot, although there are three USB ports reserved for "accessories". The console relies solely on 3G wireless for communications.
To support the project, Zeebo Inc. will partner up with regional 3G providers (Claro 3G in Brazil, for example) to deliver ZeeboNet, the content distribution and sale service that zaps new titles directly to the console's 1GB Flash NAND storage...but for a price. Game sizes vary from 8MB up to 50MB and are delivered OTA on the ZeeboNet through the regional wireless partners.
The console will cost approximately $199 when it is launched in Brazil, which sounds like quite a lot but, the company also reckons the wee Wii will "cost a Brazilian consumer almost USD$1000". In our humble opinion, if you have to pay $1000 for a Wii, then something is very, very wrong and you could possibly get it cheaper on a contract, but hey, what do we know?
As for that desperately important detail of all console launches - the games: The Zeebo will include four pre-installed games, including FIFA 2009, NFS Carbon, Brain Challenge and Prey Evil, and will allow the download of Quake free of charge, over ZeeboNet. Ten games are available at launch, with 51 expected by the end of the year. Prices will be set in "Z-Credits", ZeeboNet's currency.
Industry players like Activision, Capcom, EA, ID Software and THQ - to name but a few - have also all thrown their weight behind the Zeebo.
Now, if only Zeebo could tap into that juicy MAME-like ROM market, they could make a killing on really addictive, well-known franchises... Metal Slug anyone? µ
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Given that it's Tectoy who do re-releases of old Sega consoles I think it's a shame they didn't go for the old Dreamcast hardware in this. They'd instantly have a library of classics for starters...
if you buy it in the legal way is the price here, at least the ps3 costs the same $1000.
The problem here is the high taxes, of about 100% of the product+shipping, plus lots of other taxes over the (product+shipping)*2.
I work at a game developer here, and the nintendo ds development kits come to us costing about 3x times the nintendo value
Brazil has the most expensive Ipod in the world. That's because importing taxes mounts to exess a 100% of the product value plus handling and shipping. Zeebo spinster obviously exaggereted a bit, as a legally purchased Wii comes at a price around US$800,00 while the ilegally imported comes at US$500,00. And he undestated the real price of the Zeebo as well, because of "exchange rate fluctuations" it will be sold here a little bit under US$300,00. That's too much for a non-portable, non-usable gaming cellphone to me. They even plan to sell games from US$4 to US$13, obvioulsy low quality, cellphone level games, where you can get pirated wii and PS2 games for about US$4,00 sold about anywhere. Maybe Zeebo concept is good, but in Brazil, it will fail miserably...
Sounds doomed to me too. They are pretty much ignoring the fierce M$/Sony/Nintendo competition, not to mention piracy and black market.
Maybe when Brazil had a closed market it would have some hope, I remember MSX doing really well while it was not the best option world-wide.
Now it's way too easy to buy a PS2 and any game for a ridiculous price, which certainly provides a better gaming experience since you can't do much with 50Mb games.
Unless they know something about Brazil's market being closed again, I don't see how they see success in this. Which is a shame.
Man, that’s a pretty big footprint.
Unless ... the silhouette is A5, and the footprint is somewhat smaller? That would make more sense