Step right up! The Linux based console you never heard of is taking pre-orders! Who will be first? You there sir, can we interest you in the wave of the future in gaming technology? Alright, on a more serious note now, yes the Evo Smart Console is now taking pre-orders and is supposed to be launched on April 10. No one really knew what Evo was until a couple days ago and we’re not really sure exactly what to make of it.

The concept of Evo is simple: An open source home gaming console platform. Devilishly simple indeed. The system’s specs are questionable, the price point is ridiculous and the supposed launch library of games is confusing and almost laughable. This system is more or less a tightly packed sub-par PC with a Linux based OS running on it. On release the system is going to run you a staggering $380 and give you much less than comparable gaming consoles, simply based on game libraries alone. Evo will run games off of SD cards and since the platform is open you’ll be free to develop your own games if you so see fit to do so.

What we can’t figure out is if this is for real or not. Just looking at the image of the system you would think that having sunk some amount of money into developing a hardware platform that you could get some half decent promotional pictures out there. But what is out there looks like a really terrible photoshop job. To top that off, the website is some horrible fully flash pixelated pile of gray poop.

Despite that, we’re not convinced that a Linux based open platform would work in the home console market anyway. To make high quality games, you need to spend money. And while I concede that a really awesome game could be done with no money in a open source format, I would argue that there wouldn’t be enough of them to keep a system afloat. Open source works great on PC but we suspect that it has no place in the home entertainment industry. So that brings us to the final questions. Is this a delayed April Fool’s joke, is it for real or is it just another piece of vaporware? We’ll find out I suppose. Until then we’ll wait in wonderment of what the hell this is all about.