Zeebo, a new console from Qualcomm

[outRider]

Zeebo

In emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China (otherwise known as BRIC), a new population of consumers is growing at an explosive rate. Within the next decade, over 800 million people will join the middle class.

Meet Zeebo™, the entertainment platform that brings the fun and excitement of interactive 3D gaming and education to tomorrow’s consumers. Using technologies such as wireless game delivery, Zeebo fundamentally alters the economics of interactive entertainment in the developing world, opening a vast new opportunity for users and content providers.

The Zeebo Entertainment Platform™ is currently shipping in limited quantities in Brazil, to be followed by broader rollouts in Latin America, Asia and beyond.

Breakthrough affordability: Zeebo hardware is based on Qualcomm’s BREW platform and MSM chipset, leveraging high-volume cellphone economics to create the world’s most affordable console. In addition, Zeebo users can buy the top game titles, localized in their language, for a fraction of the traditional retail price. And the Zeebo Console consumes only 1 watt of power--20 to 100 times less than other consoles--saving substantial energy costs (and enabling users to buy 2-3 more titles per year). The result: the first interactive entertainment and education platform matched the current realities of emerging markets and tightening economies.

Off the top of my head, I don't think it's such a terrible idea, think of it as a jacked up cell phone in a box. Qualcomm makes practically all the CDMA cell phone chipsets out there so at least they know what they're doing hardware-wise. Using 3G instead of an internet connection is kind of neat as far as access from somewhat remote places goes. Sometimes I'm surprised at the kind of stuff that's popular in developing countries that don't even register on my radar.

However, ultimately I think it's going to attract absolute drivel in terms of games... at least until there's good money to be made, if ever. I don't know if it will run cell phone Brew games easily or not, I don't know if that would be a good thing or not either. I'm curious whether or not pricing games just above the cost of pirated games will have an effect or not...

Platform
• Qualcomm Chipset

Applications Processing (Audio/Graphics)
• ARM 11 / QDSP-5 running at 528Mhz

3D Graphics Processing
• Qualcomm Adreno 130 Graphics Core
• Mobile Display Processor (MDP) (Concurrent 3D Rendering & Screen Operations)

Internal Memory
• Non-Volatile Memory: 1 GByte NAND Flash
• RAM: 128 MBytes DDR SDRAM + 32Mbyte stacked DDR SDRAM in MSM7201A

Output Color System
• PAL-M and NTSC

Video-Out Resolution
• VGA (640 x 480) - 4:3 aspect ratio

Ports and Slots
• Three USB 2.0 Standard A (for accessories)
• USB 2.0 OTG – Mini B (Accessible to Service Centers and Developers only)
• RCA Connector (Video Composite TV Signal, x2 Stereo Audio)
• SD Card Slot / Interface

Software
• BREW-based

Pre-Loaded Content
• 4 Games + 1 Free Wirelessly Downloaded Game

Audio Formats
• MIDI (72 voice polyphony 512 KB wavetable, 44kHz sampling rate)
• MP3
• PCM
• ADPCM
• CMX
• QCELP

Messaging
• SMS, server initiated

User Interface (UI)
• Proprietary Zeebo User Interface (Updatable wirelessly)

(And hey, it only took 7 years for me to start a thread at TNL. See you in 2015. )

[outRider]

Actually, the list of games they have on their site isn't as horrible as I imagined. Too bad there aren't any screenshots, I'm wondering what these games actually look like.

[cka]

sounds like something that might be fun to hack with, especially if the price point stays low...

[OGcritic]

I'm really curious as to what the games will look like. I suspect crappy.

[Frogacuda]

Yeah, I'm guessing iPhone-esque graphics. But this is competing with the Sega Master System and Famiclones, so that's going to be pretty amazing to them.

[RoleTroll]

Zeebo will sell for $199 at launch with four games pre-loaded on the system. One of those will be the original “Quake” 3-D shooting game, which as a PC title in 1996 required a state-of-the-art graphics card. Today's cell phone chips are essentially as powerful as those $2,000 PCs, and “Quake” will run on Zeebo at its original performance level, Rizzo said.

Additional games will be available as downloads, with the first download free and each additional title costing about $12.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stori.../?zIndex=71083

Doesn't seem like such a great deal to me. Then again, it does have four games pre-loaded.

[Joust Williams]

the Wii is 250 dollars and does the same thing, so I'd say it's a screamin deal

[Frogacuda]

Doesn't seem like such a great deal to me. Then again, it does have four games pre-loaded.

I think the idea is that the cost of games will be very low, competitive with the bootlegs that flood these markets.

It's a very similar model to what Nintendo did with the iQue Player in China, if anyone remembers that.

[Joust Williams]

Did it work though? I never heard of any sales numbers

And everything I have seen on Quake suggests software rendering, which didn't use a state-of-the-art card in 96.

[Frogacuda]

What have you seen?