buy a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel Dynamic ticket
giveaway for a chance to win great prizes visit Intel gaming promo.com to
learn more to give you guys some idea how excited I am to be having a look at
the NVIDIA Shield number one is I built myself a ghetto Shield which you can
check out and number two is
this that is how excited I am about NVIDIA Shield I know video is getting a
lot of flack about this product from the Enthusiast saying if I wanted to play
those games I'd play them on my PC or saying if I wanted to play those other
games I'd play them on my smartphone or saying it's too expensive or saying
whatever whatever and whatever else personally I am extremely excited about
it for a number of reasons number one is this is the first consumer grade device
that features a Tegra 4 processor so Tegra 4 might not necessarily be all
about the CPU aspect of the performance but it is all about GPU and early
benchmarks of Shield seem to be indicating that compared particularly to
the gpus you can get in most modern smartphones these days even things like
the Samsung Galaxy S4 it is very very
powerful so it's a capable little gaming platform and number two is the fact that
it enables not only the ability to play
Android devices or to Android devices to play Android games on a dedicated device
but also your PC games and last but not least with what I'd consider to be a
console grade controller now I've had my
Hands-On Shield before uh back when we did an episode of netlink weekly so I
already know what the fit and finish is like and guys it is absolutely fantastic
so included with the Box you get the shield device itself you get the
wallwart which has uh NVIDIA's well
NVIDIA logo on it so there's not really much to say there and then you also get
a micro USB charging cable I still hate micro USB I understand why they're using
it but that won't make me stop hating it you also get a quick start guide that
acts as a product tour although NVIDIA has some great videos on their YouTube
channel that can walk you through the whole process of setting it up it comes
with on the back here a mini HDMI out so
you can run it directly to your TV if you wanted to do that for whatever
reason although personally i' expect most people to use it handheld it has
micro USB right there for charging a headphone microphone Jack this is the
one ergonomic thing that I think is a little bit strange about Shield I wouldn't have minded seeing this perhaps
on the bottom of the device so it's a little bit closer to you and it's not
coming out the back of it and then finally on the back you have a micro SD
slot so Shield only has 16 gigs of memory but you can add up to 64 gigs
with a an s or micro SD XC in fact we
have one that's a very high performance SanDisk one that runs at about 80
megabytes per second so I'm super stoked on using that now the exhaust vent I've
seen it in action like I said before doesn't interfere with where your
fingers sit which is nice because there is a fair bit of power in there so it
does need active cooling so that's the only exhaust vent right there but it
exhausts away from your finger so you've got the two shoulder buttons right here
left and right as well as two trigger buttons so those are nice analog buttons
with varying uh sensitivity levels just
like that also on the back here you've got what they're calling I think they
call them tags or something like that whatever whatever branding they have for
them you can basically swap out these top I think they were calling them
Shields at the beginning and that was part of where the name came from but at
any rate you can get carbon fiber ones or whatever it's not the kind of thing
that I would be likely to replace but if I did want to customize my shield and I
knew someone who happens to be sort of crafty then I would probably just get
them to like paint this or something that would be kind of a neat way to customize your Shield without actually
spending more money on it the bottom of the device has a very nice rubberized
grip hopefully that's not going to come off over time it doesn't really feel
like it's uh like it's got any come offness to it so feels very very good
the one thing about the feeling of Shield that um sort of put me off a
little bit at first particularly I'm going to have to let you guys know once
I spend more time with it this is a device that I'll be taking home and I'll
be using and I will be doing a more extensive followup on letting you guys
know exactly what I think of NVIDIA Shield but the one thing that puts me
off a little bit about it is the weight it's quite heavy compared to something
like a smartphone or other Android device compared to to what you might be
used to however with that weight comes
solidity so you can see when I shake it around that hinge doesn't move the hinge
is strong a crappy hinge can take what otherwise might be a beautiful ID or a
really nice device and turn it into something that is annoying and then
finally useless when the thing actually breaks so I'm glad to see that they've
invested in making the hinge correct I also know speaking of investing in
making things correctly that they've gone through a ton of revisions on this
game pad since CES which was the first time I was handson with Shield so it's
got an eight-way d-pad up here on the left it's got two analog joysticks right
here that feel very actually that's quite nice they've got a bit quite a
linear feel to them okay yeah excited about that
Android navigation buttons here so home back the custom NVIDIA button which
loads up the uh NVIDIA interface so it takes you to like teger Zone and you can
uh play Android games from there or you can buy Android games or you can uh fire
up the PC streaming so PC streaming requires a few different things number
one is you need a shield number two is you need the latest drivers and GeForce
experience for your desktop number three is you need a Kepler GPU so that's
NVIDIA 600 series 650 TI and up I
believe don't maybe don't quote me on that um but honestly I'd recommend
anything from sort of a 660 and up if you want to have a great experience
whether it's on the desktop or below 650 TI boost actually isn't bad either
though okay anyway you need a game that you need the latest beta version of
steam so you have to enable beta builds of steam and then you should pretty much
be ready to go you just have to make sure you've launch the game at least
once and then you have to have the shield running on the same Wi-Fi network
as the network that your PC is attached to contrary to NVIDIA setup video where
they show both the PC and shield
connected via Wi-Fi you don't have to have them both on Wi-Fi they just have to
be connected through the same router so you press the NVIDIA button in the
middle to fire it up you can see they have a helpful instruction thing here on
the uh cover the one thing that bothers me and other people that I've seen
already a little bit about Shield is that the 5in 720p display multi-touch
blah blah blah I'm giving you guys the specs in the unboxing like I usually do
has a very large frame around it I kind of wish that they'd gone with something
more like maybe a 5 and 1/2 in and they'd reduced the uh the bezel space a
little bit because having a big bezel around a monitor really does make it
look smaller than it is 720p and 5 in
isn't that small compared to what we're used to on our phones in fact it's quite
large but I think what happens is you're used to here here here's what happens
here's why it feels small so besides the larger bezel people hold their phones
like this so there's no interface here
so you hold your phone you like this you sit this far away from it with a shield
you're going to hold it in a similar position but look how much farther the
screen is from your face so that's why the 5-in screen ends up feeling a little
bit on the smaller side it's also because of the bulkiness of the device
itself this contrasts sharply with something like the steel Series 3 which
is their little Bluetooth uh controller that you compare to your phone and
didn't end up being a very successful product but with the shield NVIDIA's
gone well no we're not going to make it small we're going to make it ergonomic
and everything else sort of well so much
so much for that there's a couple tuned speakers here actually I never did
finish the uh the the guided tour there's a microphone Port right there
and then abxy buttons so you can actually use not only the touch screen
up here for interfacing with the shield but also the button so I'm going to walk
you through that in a moment once I go through the startup process so as you
guys can see the screen is quite glossy so if you prefer mat screens uh this is
not one but we've we've come to expect that from touch screens there's also a
quick get getting started guide so it shows you the NVIDIA Button as well as
walking you through the navigation buttons and well okay so the abxy button
showing you the functionality that they mostly have so a is usually confirmed B
is usually back and then finally aha yes
you can actually use the right joystick check that out as a virtual Mouse
pointer for precision movements and this is the kind of thing I may end up
actually using a fair bit so that's uh that's that's actually pretty cool and
then you can actually click just by pressing that down I don't know if it's
going to allow me to click on continue here whoop whoop it's kind of awkward to
yeah there we go that that worked not bad or press y to agree there we go so
I'm just going to set up my Android here so if you've ever set up an Android
device before you'll have probably seen all the stuff that I just did because
this is a completely stock Android device in fact one of the things that
NVIDIA is committed to on their web page for shield is timely upgrades to the
latest Android operating systems so they've only really made a couple small
changes to it and that is well pretty much this so pressing the NVIDIA button
gives you Shield games that you have installed the shield store PC games so
you can navigate in all the ways that you're used to so you can go touchcreen
okay you can use the d-pad just like
that you can use the left analog stick
okay especially if you're not clumsy about it and finally you can use the
shoulder buttons to navigate through the different menus so you have almost so
many options that my mother would find it confusing but it's okay I'm not my
mother so I think I can handle that it comes pre-loaded with a couple of Shield
games so we're going to go ahead and go up Shield games so we have real boxing
Riptide gp2 Beach Buggy Blitz Sonic 4 Episode 2 and so these are this
particularly is a Tegra HD game you can tell from the little logo in the top and
if you want to shop for more of them you can check out the shield store there so
they have everything from free games to paid games and you can of course use the
regular Google Play Store as well it also comes pre-loaded with a couple of
other applications including Twitch TV if you're a gamer who's got something
like a shield there's a good chance you watch game streams on Twitch or maybe the line of tech tips when show on
Twitch that's another option as well and I just want to cover a couple of other
hardware specs before I give you guys sort of the followup so actually no I'll
tell you what we're going to follow up with first we're going to be doing get Shield versus our actual shield in terms
of latency comparison so guys stay tuned for that that's going to be really
exciting remember that Shield has a very
excellent Wireless implementation so it's Wireless N but it's mimo so that is
um pretty much an effective doubling of the available bandwidth and also because
it uses the 5 gahz band it is able to potentially reduce interference with
random household devices so there's that there's also the fact that it uses the
built-in h264 encoding on Kepler in order to reduce the file sizes of the
images that are being beamed to it when you're using the beta right now it's
beta game streaming from your desktop so we want to compare latency as well as
image quality to our ghetto Shield that we built using an HTC1 and an Xbox 360
controller um it does have GPS built in it has 2 gigs of RAM and I think that's
pretty much it for the stuff that I'd forgotten so far and then the second
follow-up will be more of a long-term review I don't do many reviews but this
is something that I'm going to spend probably a good month with and give you
guys some idea once I have it how much do I actually use the bloody thing
because I have an Android phone I have a PC so what am I going to use this for I
don't know maybe that'll give you guys some idea if it's something that you'll use as well but I find the form factor
very comfortable Shield has outstanding battery life better than pretty much any
phone so it's great for watching things like movies in theory which I haven't
done yet it's also more ergonomic to hold than something like a tablet
necessarily when you're carrying it around with you you know put it down like that there see there's your movie
whereas tablets you have to carry them around with what are often very awkward
see like look at this this is uh sort of what I'd consider to be like a typical
tablet case this is an Iconia W7 and you
kind of like prop it up on this thing
but I I never quite trust them whereas something like a shield makes a lot of
sense to me but of course it has a smaller screen than most tablets at any
rate guys that's it for the shield unboxing don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews
and other computer videos click like on the video if you liked it click dislike
if you disliked it and definitely leave a comment if there's anything that you
want me to particularly talk about when I'm giving my longer term impressions of
NVIDIA Shield in an upcoming video