Despite its problems, we actually liked Nvidia's original Shield Android gaming handheld.
Our biggest issue with it was that it was bulky and heavy. With rumors
swirling around about a Shield 2, we were hoping to see a slimmer,
lighter design.
So consider us initially disappointed when we
learned that the next iteration of Shield would just be yet another
Android tablet. Yawn, right? The fact of the matter is that the Shield
Tablet may be playing in an oversaturated market, but it's still great
at what it sets out to be.
At eight inches, the Shield Tablet features a gorgeous
1,900x1,200 display, which shares the same resolution as Google's
flagship Nexus 7
tablet. At 13.1 ounces, the Shield Tablet is about three ounces heavier
than the Nexus 7 but still a lot lighter than the original's 1 lb. 4.7
ounces.
Part of the weight increase with the Shield Tablet over
the Nexus 7 is due to the extra inch that you're getting from the
screen, but also because the Shield Tablet is passively cooled and has
an extra thermal shield built inside to dissipate heat. It's a little
heavier than we like, but isn't likely to cause any wrist problems. On
the back of the Shield is an anti-slip surface and a 5MP camera, and on
the front of the tablet we have a front-facing 5MP camera and two
front-facing speakers. While the speakers are not going to blow away
dedicated Bluetooth speakers, they sound excellent for a tablet. In
addition to the speakers, the Shield Tablet has a 3.5mm headphone jack
up at the top. Other
ports include Micro USB, Mini HDMI out, and a MicroSD card slot capable
of taking up to 128GB cards. Buttons on the Shield include a volume
rocker and a power button which we found to be a little small and
shallow for our liking.
Performance
All of this is running on the latest version of Android KitKat version 4.4. Nvidia says that it will update the tablet to Android L
within a few weeks of Google's official release. If Nvidia's original
Shield is any indication of how well the company keeps up with OS
updates, you should be able to expect to get the latest version of
Android but after a couple of weeks if not a months after release.
Regardless, the Shield Tablet is running a pretty stock version of
Android to begin with the main difference being that Nvidia has
pre-loaded the tablet with its Shield Hub, which is a 10-foot UI for you
to purchase, download, and launch your games.
Arguably the real star of the tablet is Nvidia's new Tegra K1
mobile superchip. The 2.2GHz quad-core A15 SOC features Nvidia's Kepler
GPU architecture and 192 CUDA cores along with 2GB of low power DDR3.
K1 supports many of the graphical features commonplace in GeForce
graphics card including tesselation, HDR lighting, Global illumination,
subsurface scattering, and more. In
our performance benchmarks, the K1 killed it. Up until now, the
original Shield's actively-cooled Tegra 4 is arguably one of the most if
not the most powerful Android SOC on the market, but the K1 slaughters
it across the board. In Antutu and GeekBench benchmark, we saw modest
gains of 12% to 23% in Shield versus Shield Tablet action.
But in
Passmark and GFX Bench's Trex test, we saw nearly a 50% spread, and in
3DMark's mobile Icestorm Unlimited test, we saw an astounding 90%
advantage for the Shield Tablet. This is incredible when you consider
that the tablet has no fans and a two-watt TDP. Compared to the
second-gen Nexus 7, the Shield Tablet benchmarks anywhere from 77% to
250% faster. This SOC is smoking fast.
In terms of battery life,
Nvidia is claiming you'll get 10 hours watching/surfing the web and
about five hours from gaming with its 19.75 Wh battery. This is up 3.75
Wh up from Google's Nexus 7 equivalent and from our experiential tests,
we found those figures to be fairly accurate if not a best case
scenario. It will pretty much last you all day, but you'll still want to
let it sip juice every night.
