The Ouya: First Thoughts and Initial Tinkering

One of the things that I thought was a pretty neat idea in the world of gaming was Ouya so I backed them on Kickstarter last year and it just recently arrived at my door. Aside from the well known shipping delays for kickstarter backers and lack of a decent games library yet they have a very interesting little device here. Since it's an Android platform I immediately decided to start screwing around with it to see what I could do with it. To very little surprise it's quite easy to side-load APKs on there but the Ouya controller is clumsy and dealing with the integrated browser is not fun without using a mouse/keyboard which I do not regularly keep in my living room.

So I decided to figure out what would be the best option to quickly get files and apps loaded onto my Ouya without needing to rely on USB sticks or busting out a mouse and keyboard all the time. Some folks have well documented methods utilizing Dropbox which is a pretty clever way to go about it, but I'm not a big fan of using cloud syncing services for things like this. Since I have a Synology NAS in my house that I use for file storage I had a feeling I could utilize this somehow and sure enough I was able to come up with a solution fairly easily. Here's what I did:

1. Side-load the ES File Manager (my file/app manager of choice for Android) onto the Ouya via the integrated browser. This can be easily obtained from here.

2. Inside ES I created a connection to the CIFS share on my Synology NAS by going to the LAN section and adding a new server connection. Enter in the IP address of your system and the path to the share along with your credentials if that is necessary.

3. Profit. Now I can get files to my Ouya by pulling them down from my desktop/laptop/tablet/whatever and dropping it into the CIFS share. Fire up ES on my Ouya and copy the files to the local storage.

Obviously there are many ways that you can get files onto the Ouya and this method may not be ideal for everyone but it works well for me. The Ouya is a neat distraction for the time being and they still have some problems to work out but I really am rooting for them. I backed them not just to get a console - I like their philosophy and I want a platform like this to do well and flourish. We will have to wait and see how things develop and if gamers embrace the concept - I hope they do!