Technology Slice Blog

Onlive Microconsole - We had a chance to snag an early copy of the OnLive MicroConsole. The device basically brings the streaming video game service to living rooms. The one caveat is that you need a pretty fast Internet connection. It has to be at least 5MB per second download speed for it to work. Unfortunately, I don’t have a service that fast at home, so I turned to a few friends and asked them to try it out at work. (They have a ridiculously blazing fast Internet connection.) Here’s what they said: “There’s no problem with the technology. It works as advertised. The only problem I see is when you move the camera around. There’s frame rate issues,” my housemate John said. “It doesn’t run as fast as it would locally.” He also mentioned that there’s an input lag. It was noticeable on NBA 2K11 despite the nice graphics. Overall, they said they were impressed it worked because streaming video games is hard to do logistically. One of them said he wouldn’t play fighting games on the...