NVIDIA Shield is a truly strange device. It combines an eight-button console-size gamepad with dual analog sticks, and a 5-inch "multi-touch, retinal" screen. It runs stock Android 4.2.1. It touts wireless PC game streaming as its main selling point. It plays Android games, it plays PC games, it does the Twitter and the Gmail, et cetera. With Shield, NVIDIA is aiming to be the Swiss Army Knife of handheld game consoles. It slices! It dices! ShamWOW!
It also costs $300, weighs nearly 1.5 pounds and takes up quite a bit of bag space. Its main selling point -- PC game streaming -- is dependent on the user already owning a PC with a relatively fancy ($140) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 GPU or better. Let's be honest, though: you already know this stuff, right? If you're reading this review, you either already own all the necessary gear and wanna know if this is a worthwhile peripheral for your PC, or you're morbidly curious about NVIDIA's (admittedly bizarre) console experiment. Let's all head below and try to find satisfaction.
Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, NVIDIA