That was effortlessly the worst keynote I have ever sat through, with the added bonus of a grotesque "gamer babe" interlude that saw a married 49 year old CEO pretending to hit on a model at a tiki bar. Rancid 1993 puke.
All that said, their Shield handheld console looks pretty spectacular, if vaporous.
5" ~retinesque~ touchscreen clamshelled onto a full-size game controller with all the bells and whistles. Outrageously powerful, has HDMI, USB, headphones, and holds a 5-10 hour charge. Runs pure Android with full Google Play access and a specially curated library built for the console itself. Can also wirelessly stream games off of a PC, including from Steam Big Picture. Cloud storage of game state comes free.
Not announced: price, storage, availability, who's making it, sales channels, or anything. So whatever. But this -is- the Sony PSP slayer, and it is another sign that all roads lead to Android+OpenGL ES on ARM as the future default game platform.
Haha, I agree that the keynote was at times extremely awkward and hard to sit through, but I have to say I enjoyed how casual it was. Compared to something like an Apple presentation, where it seems like there's 0 room for error or for tangents, this felt more "real".
It was thoroughly amateur. The host/CEO was leaden, the pacing was all over the place, anything involving women was grotesque, it was full of meaningless and half-hearted digressions, nothing shown was placed into an industry context, and their livestream offered an unskippable chat box that was mostly "U FAGGOTS" and "BRING THAT GIRL BACK".
Demo example: "Here are the guys who made the game Hawken." Who? What company? What is Hawken? What does this game mean for the industry? How is it showing off your product in the best light? What does this mean for developers?
No, none of that gets answered. Two cameras drill in through shitty sightlines at three anonymous men playing a game in silence while Jen-Hsun Huang asks things like "where are you guys at right now?" and "so what are you doing?"
Available Q2 it seems. Also more details on the SoC from Anandtech: 4 Cortex A15 on 28nm HPL (28nm low power with high-k + metal gates) running at up to 1.9 GHz and a fifth A15 core for low power work.
All that said, their Shield handheld console looks pretty spectacular, if vaporous.
5" ~retinesque~ touchscreen clamshelled onto a full-size game controller with all the bells and whistles. Outrageously powerful, has HDMI, USB, headphones, and holds a 5-10 hour charge. Runs pure Android with full Google Play access and a specially curated library built for the console itself. Can also wirelessly stream games off of a PC, including from Steam Big Picture. Cloud storage of game state comes free.
Not announced: price, storage, availability, who's making it, sales channels, or anything. So whatever. But this -is- the Sony PSP slayer, and it is another sign that all roads lead to Android+OpenGL ES on ARM as the future default game platform.