The announcement of the Nvidia Project Shield received considerable ovation at CES on January 6. This isn’t some sort of an armor we speak of, but a new handheld gaming console the company has brought to the fore.
The Project Shield appears to be a full-sized portable controller at first glance. It comprises of two joysticks, a D-pad, A, B, X and Y buttons, left and right bumpers and analog triggers. Additionally, keys such as start, back, home and volume as well as a multi-function power button have been included.
And at the same time, it hoists a flip-out display. The retinal screen spreads as much as 5 inches diagonally and rolls out visuals in 720 pixels. Apart from the two integrated speakers on each side, there are two tuned ports that should be able to offer a good quality bass response.
Jen Hsun Huang, the company’s CEO, believes that the device will bring about similar improvements in the field of gaming, just like the iPod and the Kindle eReader have done with respect to music and books, respectively. The console lives a double life; it can be used as controller to play games on the incorporated screen or act as a wireless client to a GeForce GTX-driven computer.
Being a portable system, it is easy to carry around and offers controls for playing whilst on the move. It runs the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean OS and so, people have an array of games to download via the Google Play store. Users can now also stream game visuals from a desktop onto their controller by wirelessly connecting it to their GeForce GTX PC.
At the hub of the gaming console rests the latest Tegra 4 processor which also saw the crack of dawn on Sunday itself. The SoC has a quad core CPU just like the Tegra 3 and tags along a GeForce GPU with 72 custom cores. It moreover employs ARM’s newest A15 architecture and makes use of Nvidia’s 4-Plus-1 design. The 2nd generation fifth battery-saver core along with Prism 2 display technique is said to provide hours of gameplay between charges.
The Project Shield is expected to strike the US and the UK initially, in the second quarter of this year. People can keep an eye out for the price details as well as final specifications sometime around the release date. Until then, check out a demo of the device projected at the CES 2013 posted below.
Known specifications:
– 5-inch retinal display
– Android 4.2 Jelly Bean OS
– Nvidia Tegra 4 processor
– Ported speaker system