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Wikipad and the race to the 4G gaming console
The gaming tablet three decades in the making is here to put your Nintendo 3DS on notice.
Written by Red Bull UK
7 min readPublished on
Wikipad, the gaming tablet
Wikipad, the gaming tablet© Red Bull UK
Frazer Townley has been selling game consoles for as long as he can remember. Thirty years ago, the co-founder of Wikipad was a buyer at Dixons, where he helped introduce the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and pitch it as an arcade machine for the home by bundling it with a joystick and ten games. A decade later, he created the GamesMaster Zone in Comet stores to sell the latest gear from Nintendo, Sega and their rivals, from Mega Drives to Game Boys and beyond.
Fast forward twenty years, and everything and nothing has changed.
Home consoles are still going strong, but the handheld market's changed beyond recognition: now it's smartphone games and tablet computers that are muscling in on Nintendo's turf, and this time, it's Townley who's helping make them, not sell them to the public.
If you've not heard of the Wikipad yet, you soon will do. It's a tablet, but it's no ordinary iPad competitor: while it runs Google's popular Android operating system on Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 processor like many others, the seven-inch device comes with its own physical controller dock. Slot it on and hey presto, you've got your own portable console, complete with tactile buttons, thumbsticks and even a D-pad. It won't make browsing Facebook any easier, or help much setting a high score in Candy Crush Saga but they'll certainly help up your kill ratio in Modern Combat multiplayer, or blast your way through Dead Trigger on the highest difficulty setting.
Though Townley says 85 engineers have worked on the project in total, there are only a dozen full time on the team hoping to take on the likes of Apple, Sony and Microsoft. "The majority of us are based in Los Angeles, but we’ve got offices in Hong Kong," he tells Red Bull UK. As managing director and president of sales however, he's based in the air more than anywhere else. "My role is in every country, so tomorrow I’m off to China, but I've been to just about every country in the world in the last 12 months."
Wikipad, the gaming tablet
Wikipad prepares to take on its gaming rivals© Red Bull UK
Townley's return to the gaming business with Wikipad happened almost by accident. The founders, Townley, James Bower and Matthew Joynes, were looking into creating their own educational tablets, but it quickly became clear that despite good intentions, nobody really wants to work on a touchscreen with no keyboard - or at least pay to.
"I took that to various people in the United States and the feeling at the time was ‘Well, it’s educational, it’s got to be a bit more exciting’, so we thought about how we could ramp that up. So we came up with the game controller."
When their market research came back, they realised they'd been missing a trick. "Getting into gaming was serendipitous but having said that, as we dug into the details, we found that 67 percent of all tablet usage is gaming."
The solution: make a tablet that does everything rivals can, but beats them all hands down for gaming. "We have a tablet that’s as good as every other tablet for that one third, but we have a tablet that does more than any other tablet for the two thirds. All of a sudden it’s a more compelling story," he says.
As for the name? The Wikipad has no affiliation with Wikipedia, thought one of the founders has worked with some of the encyclopaedia team in the past. "It was just a name that stuck," Townley explains.
While the core concept - an Android tablet with optional buttons - has remained unchanged since the team first announced their plans at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2012, the Wikipad’s shifted size substantially, from an originally planned ten-inch tablet down to a seven-inch model. That sounds small on paper, but in practice, that means it’s little over half the size originally envisioned - and it wasn’t by choice. As the team geared up to produce the large model late last year, the manufacturing partner ran out of the necessary screens.
“There are manufacturing issues that we had to overcome. We are not one the big boys,” Townley says. “We were ready to launch the ten-inch last year and we found a technical issue with the controller. By the time we fixed the technical issue with the controller the tablet manufacturer announced that it was an end of life on the panel - it was a real kicker.”
Townley had to go back to the drawing board, but he took the opportunity to completely rethink the design as the likes of Apple and Asus popularised smaller tablets with the iPad mini and Google Nexus 7. “Overnight it went from an iPad size ten-inch product to a portable product, a seven-inch product. We changed focused, we had to,” he says, though the team kept the game controller add-on almost unchanged - screens gets smaller, but people’s hands don’t.
The Wikipad eventually hit stores in the US in June for $249.99, around £160 (Townley won’t reveal numbers, but the Wikipad is currently sold out at retail giant Best Buy), just as another competitor came to market, Razer’s absurdly powerful Windows slate with controller handles, the Razer Edge.
Wikipad, the gaming tablet
Wikipad was 30 years in the making© Red Bull UK
Despite the similarities - they’re both tablets that slot into a game controller - Townley says they’re not immediate rivals. After all, the Edge will set you back $1,300 (£850).
“I like what Razer are trying to do...I really don’t want to comment on their controller, but the price of their controller is the price of our complete kit. They’re clearly not trying to pitch it at our audience,” he says.
Then of course there’s Sony’s PS Vita, an uneasy rival and partner given that the Wikipad is one of only a handful of devices to be PlayStation certified, and capable of connecting to Sony’s Android game download service. The PS Vita’s had a difficult time since launch, with low reported sales, so we have to ask, how does Townley think the Wikipad can avoid a similar fate?
“I would say that the Vita, it’s an exciting product, it does some great things, very innovative. However it’s one dimensional. We are a tablet, we are detachable, you can take the gaming controllers off and go to work and use the tablet as a tablet and it will perform as well as any other tablet on the market....Plus the games, you’re not constrained to cartridge games or an ecosystem that is designed purely for one brand...the Android game market has created some very interesting games and interesting financial models for playing games that the Vita perhaps doesn’t enjoy.”
The Wikipad team are hoping to bring the tablet to UK shores very soon, though Townley is reluctant to specify a price or put a pin in the calendar (“It’s going to be a period of time but it’s not going to be months and months and months.”) - UK distributor MSE however has said it plans to have the Wikipad on sale this month.
Then there’s next-gen. The makers of other Android gaming systems like the Ouyaand Mad Catz Mojo console have already said they plan to keep up with the rapid advances in mobile technology by releasing new versions at regular intervals, and Townley hopes to do the same and then some, by potentially partnering up with mobile networks to deliver a gaming device that lets you jump online anywhere at super fast speeds.
“We would want to keep pace with chipset technology which is very important, we have to do that...so there’s that. There are other ideas that we have that take gaming to a different level. There’s opportunities with telcos to have wireless connected devices, not Wi-Fi connected devices, as that technology becomes cheaper and cheaper.”
Sony’s already tried just that with a 3G-powered PS Vita, but Townley hints that between Android’s huge array of apps and the arrival of even faster 4G speeds, next year could bring us an even more powerful Wikipad. “We are looking very closely at what the capabilities are of the new LTE [4G] modems, so I think you would see in 2014 something that’s more connectable,” he says.
In the meantime though, Townley's got a few more pressing things on his To Do list than read the tech tea leaves. "Let’s sell what’s on the truck first shall we?"
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