Ouya Android Console Breaks $1m Kickstarter In Hours

The Pebble smartwatch has a challenge on its hands: Ouya's highly-hackable Android console Kickstarter has crashed past its $950,000 funding goal in the space of less than half a day. A combination of slick, Yves Behar-designed looks, the flexibility of Google's Android OS, and of course that alluring $99 target price brought out gamers in their droves.

The $95 reward band – the cheapest to get an Ouya console, and of which only 1,000 were available – was gone within a few hours, and the $99 band is roughly half sold. Most impressive, though, is that Ouya has already seen three takers for its $10,000 "Angel List", backers of which get their name engraved on every console in the first batch, among other things.

Altogether, spread across the various backer tiers, there are 11,950 consoles up for grabs, and at this rate it seems all of them will be gone before the Kickstarter funding round closes. That's due to happen on August 9, though at time of writing the project has already broken the million dollar mark.

Inside the sleek casing there's a Tegra 3 chipset, Wifi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and 8GB of internal storage, along with an SD card slot and USB 2.0 connectivity; the controller has all the usual buttons and sticks you'd expect to see, plus a trackpad. The first consoles aren't expected to ship until March 2013, however, which is likely to disappoint many.