We all knew that the Dev Kits from Ouya were on their way to developers and with that, the ball really starts rolling on this little console’s launch. When a product like this enters the wild, we know it’s just a matter of time before it hits YouTube and has its secrets laid out for all to see. Well, we don’t have to wait any longer because it’s already been done for us – by the kind folks at Ouya themselves.
The team behind the console have kindly given us a taste of what the 1,200 developers that signed up will be getting, not only that but it’s the first peak we’ve gotten of the console concerning its looks and its size. When word of the Ouya first broke out, we knew it was going to be coming in a small package but now that we can see it, it looks like something out of the future. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration but this thing is tiny.
I’m a bit particular when it comes to input devices and gaming, my Xbox controller is tweaked and I have a very expensive mouse and keyboard set-up on my PC. This is why I was happy to get a look at the controllers shipping with the device, they look well built and should feel good in the hand. The batteries actually fit inside the handles of the controllers to give it a nice weight and there will be optional customization for the handles in the future.
Inside the little box is the Tegra 3 quad-core CPU we all know and love, alongside 8GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM. So, while the Ouya’s internals might look a little dated next to smartphones like the Nexus 4 and Droid DNA packing Snapdragon S4 Pros and 2GB of RAM, Nvidia’s quad-core beast is still plenty good enough to crank out the pixels. What struck me as particularly interesting about the device is that there is a fan in there to keep everything cool. ARM devices like this have long cranked up the core count and the clock speeds but they’re often held back by poor dissipation. An easy parallel to draw is how well a passively cooled graphics card will perform compared to an actively cooled card. A cooling fan might sound trivial but it’s good to see that the people behind Ouya are ready and willing to have this little box cranked to its fullest.
As with the open nature of the Ouya project, the video shows just how easy it is to open the box up and take out the main board powering it all. There’s HDMI out and a microUSB input for hooking up to a PC. There are no games that come included with this dev package as it’s solely for developers but, we’re sure that we’ll see some more of the Ouya pretty soon. Take a look at the unboxing video below.