http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-10-04-epic-xbox-720-ps4-could-be-mobile

"Epic Games boss Mark Rein reckons future Xbox and PlayStation consoles could be portable.

"Imagine a future Xbox 360 that is actually a tablet you carry around..."

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That would be interesting indeed. Leverage the xbox brand and step into iPad territory through the backdoor.

Sounds great in theory, practically I don't think it would work very well.

What they could do which is more practical I think is offer cheap (and I mean ~$10 - $20) "docking stations" that allow you to quick disconnect your console from one location and quick connect it into another station in a different room or say, at work or a bar. Or maybe not even that high-tec, just having a built-in power cord and wireless HDMI would do wonders for portability. Trying to fish out all the cables from behind my tv is a real pain in the butt.

High performance processing and low-power portability are distinctly at odds. The most reasonable way I see of achieving this is to offload processing and rendering to a server farm and stream video to the mobile device, like OnLive could do if it succeeds.

The home console as we know it now won't merge with low-powered portables, like Nypyren said -- the more likely path, however, is that portables will subsume what we know as the home console today as they become increasingly more powerful.

This is the same trend we see now, and have been seeing for several years, where laptop computers have surpassed their desktop counterparts in sales volume. People want to be able to take their work, games and media with them -- the PC market proves this. Unlike the PC market, however, once gamers make the switch to predominantly buying handhelds, there will be less and less incentive for console manufacturers to continue to produce home consoles. For Nintendo, who's various gameboy models have rivaled and indeed outsold their home offerings for years, we already see the fruit of this trend -- They've de-emphasized their home focus, and with the Wii, tried something radically different -- IMO, they chose this path not for innovation's sake alone, but because they realized that the home market, going forward, won't support three functionally identical machines any longer.

I believe Nintendo will continue this convergence trend with their next home console. Primarily, I believe they will drop PowerPC in favor of a higher-end, multi-core ARM-based processor in their home machines. For Nintendo, this would make sense -- Firstly, having not pushed the CPU/GPU envelope in their home machines, even today's high-end ARM designs offer significant performance increases over the Wii, so such a move really is an upgrade, rather than a lateral or backwards step. Secondly, it makes sense for Nintendo to centralize around one architecture in order to concentrate their expertise and the expertise of their third-party developers on one platform -- This extends further to surrounding technologies like OpenGL|ES. Nintendo has a history of making their current-gen portables roughly comparable to their last-gen home gaming system, and with the adoption of ARM for their home consoles, they will reach a point where their current-gen portable *literally is* their last-gen home system, in portable form. Once they are there, what they do in the home space now will be defined by what they want to do in the portable space 5-7 years from now, and whether they're able to shift home units will become increasingly inconsequential.

Microsoft and Sony will have a harder time following suit, since their current-gen systems are so powerful that only the highest-end ARM systems on the drawing board can hold a candle to either current-gen system -- meaning they've got to ride the current gen for another few years, or make a lateral "upgrade" to ARM concentrating on other areas such as input, system RAM, etc (or, figure out a way to make PPC/Cell efficient enough to go in a portable). For them I think converging their home and portable lines is much less likely for the above reasons, and also because both are media companies with a stake in the living room.

The future I see, IMO, is that very-high-end gaming will migrate back to the PC, the home console will be replaced by set-top-boxes (Like GoogleTV and AppleTV) which will also have game content in addition to media and websurfing, and the traditional gaming space will migrate to portables. These portables will make it easy to play on the big screen through Wireless video transmission, and some games will make use of the television for the common view of the world and use the portable screen do display a different, private view of things (think of a sports game where the game is shown on the big screen and plays and roster changes are selected on the portable's screen).

Quote:

Original post by Nypyren High performance processing and low-power portability are distinctly at odds. The most reasonable way I see of achieving this is to offload processing and rendering to a server farm and stream video to the mobile device, like OnLive could do if it succeeds.

No need for a render farm. As long as high speed wireless internet access is available, you could just have your home PC or console do all the heavy duty processing/rendering and stream the video feed to your pad over the internet. The pad would only run a remote GUI.

Provided a good connection, you could already do that today without much trouble. Lag may be an issue though, especially if you are covering large distances.

The concept that gaming consoles would be replaced/morph into a tablet is silly - a tablet just isn't suitable for the type of use a console gets (single play or play with friends around a big screen TV) and, as Nypyren pointed out high performance processing and low-power portability are distinctly at odds. What could well happen is the the home computer unit has a central hub (in the home or in the cloud) which streams console games to your TV, home productivity to the den/kitchen and consumable media to a tablet sized wifi viewing screen. Basically what many people already have - a home server.

Quote:

Original post by Yann L Quote: Original post by Nypyren High performance processing and low-power portability are distinctly at odds. The most reasonable way I see of achieving this is to offload processing and rendering to a server farm and stream video to the mobile device, like OnLive could do if it succeeds. No need for a render farm. As long as high speed wireless internet access is available, you could just have your home PC or console do all the heavy duty processing/rendering and stream the video feed to your pad over the internet. The pad would only run a remote GUI. Provided a good connection, you could already do that today without much trouble. Lag may be an issue though, especially if you are covering large distances.

This was in the news 2 or 3 years back, some company reckoned they'd do exactly this so you could play games on your TV. I don't see it taking off.