Ice Cream Sandwich will be a video games console… So what?

Android Ice Cream Sandwich, the update that will marry smartphones and tablets in blissful union come mid-November, will natively support USB gamepads and HDMI output. That’s gamepads plural, and HDMI, as in the connector that your 50-inch 1080p HDTV uses. In other words, if you have an Xbox 360 or PS3 and a few controllers, you’ll be able to turn your ICS-powered Galaxy Nexus into a video games console.
Now, we say “video games console,” but in reality the only similarity this PS Galaxy Nexus 360 has to its big, boxy forebears is the tangle of wires connected to it. The Galaxy Nexus’s processor, the OMAP4460, despite being brand new, is still a lot weaker than the processors found inside the six-year-old current crop of consoles. The smartphone’s CPU and GPU might be capable of rendering games at a level acceptable to mobile gamers, but on a widescreen TV it would shock you. Take a look at the Infinity Blade II trailer, which (presumably) is being demonstrated on the fastest mobile GPU out there (the Apple A5) — set the quality to 720p, expand it to full screen, and then imagine what it would look like at 50-inches.
Then there are the games themselves. For a start, smartphone and tablet games are almost exclusively designed for smaller, limited-resolution displays — and perhaps more importantly, almost all of the current crop of games have been tailor made for touchscreen controls. This isn’t to say that games couldn’t be reprogrammed to accept gamepads, but the problem is a little trickier than that: when was the last time you played a mobile game that had six degrees of freedom and more than a few actual actions? You could certainly make a console-type game for the iPhone or Galaxy Nexus, but it probably wouldn’t be very playable unless you had a gamepad — and at that point you’ve removed most of the benefits of using a smartphone as your games console.
Your next smartphone isn’t going to replace the Xbox 720, Wii U, or PS4, then, but there is one positive takeaway from Ice Cream Sandwich’s console-like features: Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, unless they want to be cut out of their incredibly lucrative market in the next few years, really have to watch their collective asses. It has already been remarked that smartphones have obviated most reasons for owning a PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS, and really there’s no reason why the iPhone 7 or Galaxy Neutrino Supernova won’t eventually gobble up much of the console market as well.
At times like these, I like to remind myself that all computers are fundamentally and functionally identical — it’s just the form that separates your desktop PC from your smartphone, or your smartphone from your video console. For now, a console requires a DVD or Blu-ray drive, and enough space for a juicy CPU and GPU. Games are already being distributed on SD-like, non-volatile flash memory cards, and it’s only a matter of months or years until smartphones and tablets are powerful enough to drive the gaming experiences that we desire. In other words, it’s inevitable that today’s giant consoles will replaced by something smaller and more portable – it’s just a matter of whether Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft get there first.

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