History of video games/Platforms/ZTE Fun Box

History

The ZTE campus in Shenzhen, China in 2007. By 2014 ZTE would be a major player in consumer electronics in China, and was experiencing large profits from the booming smartphone market.

The ZTE Fun Box was announced shortly after China ended it's ban on video game consoles. The ZTE Fun Box was a bid by a domestic manufacturer to enter the massive and newly legalized console market of China.

The ZTE Fun Box was launched in China in 2014 by ZTE and The9 Limited for either 689 yuan or 698 yuan. This joint venture was handled by a company known as ZTE9. Despite being a new console, the system had support from major traditional developers including EA and Take Two.

Technology

The FunBox will be supported by a comprehensive ecosystem that encompasses hardware, content and channels

—ZTE9 chairman Adam Zeng, ZTE Fun Box debut

Compute

The ZTE Fun Box is powered by a NVIDIA Tegra 4 system on a chip containing four ARM Cortex A15 chips clocked at 1.8 gigahertz and a 72 core GeForce GPU. The system has 2 gigabytes of DDR3L RAM, as well as 8 gigabytes of eMMC flash storage. Overall the ZTE Fun Box possessed respectable, if not particularly exceptional, performance for a microconsole of the time.

Hardware

The console has radios for 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz dual band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, as well as Bluetooth 4.0. The ZTE Fun Box has also supports 100 megabit ethernet for wired connections.

The system had only a single full size USB port, which was a point of concern by some gamers.

The microconsole was available in 12 different colors, an unusually high number of variations available for any non-major console. This is especially notable for microconsole of the era, as most were only made in one or two styles over the system life.

Software

The ZTE Fun Box runs version 4.3 of the Android operating system and could access games through NVIDIA TegraZone. The system was touted as supporting video calls.