If you didn’t think that the already fairly expansive list of offerings for the Home Android Consoles was large enough, a Chinese manufacturer has one more to throw onto the list. A company out of China called TCL has just announced their own offering for the Android micro console called the T2(Terminator fans anyone?), sporting a sleek little design for the box itself and a controller that looks like it was ripped straight from an OUYA design, and had a few extra buttons added on for good measure and some more functionality. The T2 controller looks to have some slightly more raised buttons, like the small round home button for example that sits between both the joysticks. On the OUYA that button is flat, and serves the purpose for not only powering on an OUYA console that is turned off, but also links the controller to the console. With the T2 that very button is raised, and we can only assume that the functionality is the same.
While their may only be a handful of options available to consumers here in the U.S., more major micro consoles like the Mad Catz M.O.J.O. and the OUYA are available in China as well, alongside options like the Game Stick, the recently announced Funbox from ZTE, Huawei’s Tron game consoles that was shown off just a couple months ago and now the T2. It seems like Android game consoles might be quite a bit more popular over there. The T2, short of having pretty much the same controller design as the OUYA’s, sports some different specs like Android 4.2 Jelly Bean software instead of a completely different ecosystem that is just simply Android based. It also has 2GB of RAM which is no different, but sports way more storage with 16GB of onboard memory to the OUYA’s 8GB on the first model that came out. Current OUYA models house 16GB of storage.
It also uses a different processor. While the OUYA use a previous generation of CPU from Nvidia with the Tegra 3, the TCL T2 uses an a new Allwinner A31 processor which features the Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU while the PowerVR SGX544 MP2 GPU handles the graphics side of things. The little box(which isn’t really a box shape at all) has one USB port, HDMI for connection to the TV, ethernet, and a micro USB port. The controller literally looks to have all the same buttons as the OUYA plus some additional ones that could be used for media controls by the looks of it, which sit near the top center where the OUYA touchpad is. As for when the T2 will go on sale it’s said to hit the Chinese market at the end of this month which is just in a couple days, and will retail for $110 which is only a little more than what the OUYA costs.