bizarre screen-meets-controller device - the whole thing felt a bit
conceptual at the time of release, which is probably why Nvidia
has continued to keep it locked safely inside the US.
But since launch, the portable has gone from strength to strength:
the introduction of Nvidia's Gamestream offered Shield users a
bunch of new games that can be beamed straight from the PC,
while the Gamepad Mapper feature fixed the problem of games
that didn't have controller support. All in all, it's turned into a
pretty meaty bit of gaming kit. Basically, it was much more than
a glorified Flick Golf player.
Which is why it's time Nvidia re-hyped the Shield initiative.
Its spent time listening to feedback, reconsidering what people
want, and its come back with a slightly different proposition:
the Shield Tablet.
The Shield tablet looks a bit like an oversized HTC One.
That's no criticism - TechRadar readers should know how
highly we rate that handset.
Upon closer inspection, within the realm of tablets, it falls between
the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 - as in not too small and not too big.
It's also much lighter than expected and feels nice in hand
when gaming on the touchscreen.
You would expect Nvidia to pull out the big guns for a gaming
-dedicated tablet and, while a rep told us that we probably won't
be able to run Titanfall natively you'll still be able to stream it, the
Tegra K1 chip gives this slab a satisfying amount of whallop.
The Shield tablet comes in two flavours: a 16GB WiFi-only version,
and a 32GB LTE variant. The storage on both of those can be
expanded up to 128GB. In the US, it's likely AT&T and T-Mobile
will be your carrier choices, though the rep said it's still "unconfirmed"
for now - same for the UK.