This Panasonic Jungle Portable MMO Device...Follow

First off, the Jungle is rumored to run on Linux. There's stumbling block one.

We'll continue to use World of Warcraft as an example. World of Warcraft does not run natively on Linux. You cannot grab your World of Warcraft disc, slip it into a Linux machine, and click on go; it does not work that way.

That's not to say that World of Warcraft will not run on Linux. Linux users play World of Warcraft every day. How? They use programs like Wine, which allows Windows programs to run on Linux. It's not a simple thing, but that's to be expected. Linux is an operating system built to do things well, not simply.

Is your average World of Warcraft player up to the task? That's not likely. If Panasonic offered versions of the Jungle with World of Warcraft preloaded on them I might see the device capturing the hearts of a few players, but otherwise the complexity of getting their favorite game running might drive them back to their trusty laptops.

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The Jungle scores points for portability, but it also doesn't have a mouse. Instead, it sports a small touchpad and a directional pad, neither of which serve as capable mouse alternatives. It features a full keyboard, but it's a very small full keyboard. When you're firing off healing macros, you can't afford to press the wrong keys.

Panasonic Cloud Entertainment has caused the tech world to murmur quietly over its first product: the Jungle portable gaming system. The hardware was announced—if you can call it that—last night, although details are still few and far between.

We know it's portable, we think it may have an attractive screen, and someone on MTV wrote a song about it. As far as product launches go, this one has been baffling.

Gizmodo ran the first picture of the device, alongside rumors that it had a nice screen, ran Linux, and was designed for online gaming. "The screen resolution is bananas. Everyone was freaking out about it," an unnamed source who is said to have seen the device in action at PAX told the site. If that isn't a ringingly anonymous endorsement of one aspect of a video game system, I don't know what is.

The device has a keyboard along with a touchpad and a directional pad. Panasonic has yet to make any official announcement about the hardware running this hot mess, or about any features that don't have to do with gaming.
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So far there has been little but speculation. It could be running Linux, it could do TV-out, and it could play existing games. If that's the case and the guts are moderately powerful and it's delivered at a solid price, it might... OK, can we be honest? So far this thing doesn't fit into any kind of market. The DS owns portable gaming. The iPhone already plays great games, many of which are online.