Nvidia SHIELD out now, priced at $299

Nvidia has taken its first steps into the Android gaming market with the Nvidia SHIELD, which was launched yesterday. The console costs $299 (around Rs 18,150) and is available in the United States of America and Canada.

The SHIELD is a full-fledged portable gaming console with an Xbox-esque gamepad attached to a touchscreen. The device runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, giving it access to the Google Play Store as well as all other apps. The Android UI appears to have little to no skinning and resembles stock AOSP Jelly Bean quite a lot.

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One of the SHIELD’s most notable features is PC Streaming, which is its ability to stream games running on your PC to its screen, letting you play the games on your PC on the move. This feature requires you to have an Nvidia GTX GeForce graphics card on your PC, though. Currently, PC Streaming is in beta and only 21 titles are supported.

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SHIELD is the first device to come with Nvidia’s Tegra 4 SoC, which is said to be four times as powerful as the Tegra 3 processor. The SoC packs a quad-core Cortex A15 processor, 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 16GB of in-built flash memory. The capacitive 5-inch display has a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, which translates to a pixel density of 293 ppi. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS. There’s also a mini-HDMI port on the rear alongside a microUSB port, a microSD card slot that supports cards up to 64GB in size, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

The device weighs a whopping 588 g, making it one of the heavier portable consoles  to hit the market. Looking at early reviews of the device, it seems the build quality is good and most surfaces are matte-finished. There’s also an intake fan that pulls in air from the front vent and expels it out of a vent at the rear. 

SHIELD seems quite capable of running most new games. Nvidia released a video in February that showcased the device’s game-streaming capabilities. The video showed someone playing Borderlands 2 on the handheld. Judging by the video, Shield seems very capable of running games, especially with real-time physics through Nvidia PhysX and all the graphics at the highest possible setting. According to the video, a lot of development time went into tweaking the handheld device’s audio.