One of the most anticipated Android devices of the year has to be the NVIDIA Project Shield. Not only is it mobile gaming device, but one of the most powerful Android devices in all of king’s landing the land. NVIDIA has now dropped the “project”, left the Shield, and announced most of the details that we’ve been wanting to hear from the get go. The NVIDIA Shield will be available for $349 and start shipping in June.
If you decided to sign up for the news letter at Shield.NVIDIA.com, you can pre-order the Shield right now. The general pre-order will begin on May 20th.
Thinking the price of the Shield is a bit steep? It’s not. There’s so much power put into this device that it could have landed at $450+ — somewhere near the price of a new tablet. The specs of the device make the Shield worth every penny. Still, as excited as we are, the jury is still out as to how the gamers will feel about the price point.
If for whatever reason you’ve missed us geeking out about the Shield before, the device is possibly one of the most interesting pieces of hardware we’ve seen grace the Android landscape. The NVIDIA Shield offers up a full-sized gaming controller, with a 5-inch, 720p HD multi-touch display accompanying it. Running stock Android, the Shield gives you access to over 700k applications on the Google Play Store and is a mobile gaming monster.
That’s not all, though. The most unique feature about the Shield is that it can stream Steam games from your NVIDIA GTX-powered PC right to the Shield over Wi-Fi. You no longer need to wish that Assassin’s Creed III or BioShock Infinite were mobile games. With the NVIDIA Shield, they are.
Here are some more key features for the NVIDIA Shield:
- Tegra 4 – the world’s fastest mobile processor, Tegra 4 packs 72 custom GPU cores and four Cortex-A15 CPU cores
- Console-grade controller – dual analog joysticks, a full-sized D-Pad, left and right analog triggers, full-sized bumpers and A/B/X/Y buttons
- High Fidelity Audio and Video –5-inch, 720p retinal multi-touch display and custom bass reflex tuned port audio system
- Memory and Storage – 2GB RAM, 16GB internal flash storage and microSD storage slot
- Android Jelly Bean – the latest Android Jelly Bean operating system
- And More! – 802.11n 2X2 MIMO game-speed Wi-Fi , GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, mini-HDMI, micro-USB 2.0 and 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack
Not only is the NVIDIA Shield one of the most powerful mobile devices around, its bridging the gap between mobile and PC gaming. If that’s not something to get excited about, I’m not sure what is.
You’ll soon be able to grab the Shield at Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers.