Razer micro-console planned with Android TV support

Follwiing last night’s announcement of Android TV, Google’s latest attempt to break into the living room with a custom version of Android designed for TVs and set-top boxes, the first companies have begun to pledge their support. Among them is Razer, best known for its gaming peripherals and Blade laptops, which confirmed an Android TV-based micro-console was in the works.

Razer’s currently unnamed micro-console will stream movies and games from on-demand and catch-up services such as Netflix, but will also be firmly focused on gaming. Although the company has yet to announce hardware specifics, customers should expect the most powerful mobile components for playing games at Full HD resolutions on the big screen, with graphical effects such as Tesselation introduced by the Android Enhancement Pack matching consoles and PCs in terms of visual fidelity.

“This is a console of the future,” Min-Liang Tan, co-founder and CEO of Razer, said of the announcement. “Built on Google´s incredible Android TV platform, the Razer micro-console incorporates not only hardcore and casual gaming, but music, movies and other entertainment and social applications, all on an affordable system.”

Like Google’s Android TV demonstration at the I/O conference last night, Razer envisions its micro-console being controlled by a dedicated smartphone app, along with voice control for quickly finding the content you want without having to search through countless pages first. It will almost certainly be compatible with a range of game controllers and peripherals to make playing games on the big screen much more intuitive than using a touchscreen.

The micro-console will be created by the same design team behind the Razer Blade and Blade Pro laptops, Razer Edge gaming tablet and the modular Project Christine prototype.

Razer expects the Android TV micro-console to be on sale by the Autumn, although it depends entirely on when Google decides Android TV is ready for the public; last night’s reveal was still a work in progress, and will likely ship alongside Android L later this year.