Gaming company Wonder has been working on a console that merges the best of a smartphone experience with that of a home console.
The currently untitled and still-in-development hardware efforts aim high. Wonder told The Verge in an early look that it wants to build “an entertainment ecosystem for gamers and gadget heads who are fans of forward-looking tech.”
It plans to do this with its own smartphone running its own proprietary operating system, currently referred to as WonderOS, though it’s unclear whether Wonder itself will make the phone or outsource to well-established manufacturers.
So...what does this thing actually do?
Upon release, Wonder looks to sell a hardware package alongside a subscription service. It consists of a smartphone that can make calls, run apps and do all of the phone-y things that you’re used to, but will uniquely slide into a dock that can hook up to a TV and overclock the phone's GPU for enhanced gaming performance.
Included in the offering will be a controller that the phone can be docked onto for portable gaming, a la Nintendo Switch. As for what you’ll be able to do on the Wonder hardware, it apparently plans to provide a range of content, such as “original games from existing game makers, licensed and mobile-optimized third-party titles, streaming game and media options, and other entertainment hub-like features.”
It’s hard for even the well-established players in the gaming sector to build out an ecosystem. We’ll have to wait until 2019 to see if Wonder’s gaming bid comes to pass, but it definitely has enough ambition to keep us interested.
- In the meantime, Nintendo may have plans for a Switch 2
