Ouya website now taking pre-orders

The Kickstarter-funded Android console Ouya is now available to pre-order via the company’s website.

Despite sounding like the name was inspired by watching an unhealthy amount of soft-core pornography, Ouya is in fact a pretty interesting idea. The team has apparently designed a set-top system to compete with living room consoles, powered by the low-power Tegra 3 chipset used in Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, along with a version of the Android operating system. While Android is hardly known for its vast and compelling games library, the ULP (ultra-low-power) GeForce GPU combined with a quad-core ARM processor should be able to knock out a fairly smooth playing experience, even for the most demanding of mobile gaming titles.

Check out this impressively techy preview video produced by Nvidia for some idea of what the Ouya hardware may be capable of:

 

 

All that said, we’ve yet to see a presentation of an Ouya running, so it’s pretty difficult to judge performance until we get our hands on a demo model.

The Ouya is now available for the princely sum of $99 (which equates to around £65/80EUR) with a single controller, $129 with two controllers or $189 with four. Don’t forget, if you’re ordering outside the US, you’ll need to add $20 for shipping costs. The expected delivery date on the page is April 2013, but don’t expect that to be set in stone — Ouya is not bound by a contract to deliver the item at a particular time.