NVIDIA SHIELD vs "DIY Shield" Game Streaming Demo & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,384 words · ~11 min read
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The Bit Phoenix Prodigym is compact and ready for anything. Click now to learn
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more. Welcome to my full review of
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NVIDIA's Shield handheld gaming device.
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Now, it's not going to be a full review in the sense that I compare the battery
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life to other smartphones and tablets or um you know give you empirical numbers
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on how the GPU performs. This is more of a hands-on review as well as a direct
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comparison to the Ghetto Shield, which was an Xbox 360 controller bolted to a
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smartphone running Splashtop in order to simulate the Shield gaming experience
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where you can run PC games over wireless to your handheld device. Let's start
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with the overall usage experience. So, first things first, it feels extremely
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solid in your hands. If anything, I'd say maybe a bit too solid. It can be
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quite heavy if you're sitting with it in your lap or if you're laying on your stomach playing with it, then you're
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you're not going to have any problems. But if you're laying on your back, uh
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holding it above your head and trying to play with it that way, then you might
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run into a little bit of difficulty with your with your arms getting fatigued
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after, you know, 5 or 10 minutes and you might have to shift a little bit. With
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that said, it really doesn't feel like they added the extra weight for no
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apparent reason because it's got a nice beefy battery in it. you don't really
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feel like, oh, the battery in this thing sucks. I'm playing with it, and I'm
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running out of battery. No, what happens is you play with it, you plug it in, and it'll be ready to go next time around.
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With that said, if you if you're not using the stock charger, which is a 2.1
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amp charger, you're going to be wasting your time. A 1 amp charger doesn't even
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charge this device fast enough to keep it charging while you're playing an
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Android game on it. So, make sure you're using the default charger. It is a nice
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compact 2.1 amp charger, so that's definitely a plus. In terms of
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ergonomics, I found that with my hands, um, it seems like it's designed for
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someone with slightly bigger hands than me. I do have really small hands. I wear
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like women's small motorcycle gloves, but I was able to reach the ABXY buttons
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and the D-pad without any difficulty, without shifting at all. The joysticks
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are they're a bit of a stretch for me, but I can I can move them in all
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directions without without too much of a challenge. I don't stand a chance of
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reaching any of these middle buttons without shifting. And uh actually at the
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back, the shoulder buttons as well as the triggers were fine as well. I didn't
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notice any heat that really bothered me. So nothing really transferred through
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the game pad itself. And the exhaust vent on the back moves the heat away
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from your hands. In fact, it's a little bit warm right now, but really nothing unbearable. It's got mini HDMI as well
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as charging and a headphone microphone combo jack if you're not already
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familiar with the way that Shield works. And as far as the ergonomics or as well
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as as far as the design of the game pad itself goes, it's excellent. Uh the
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buttons here have a great tactile response. The joysticks feel really
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good. The one exception is the D-pad which is kind of poopy. Um it's fine for
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something like oh you know weapon switching or um you know functionality
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that's not critical. Uh whereas if you
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were you know doing um platforming on
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it, yeah, it's it's really really not that special. The speakers are excellent
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though. So, it's loud enough that you can easily use it in an environment
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where there's a fair bit of ambient noise. And the screen is nice and IPS,
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has great viewing angles, and looks outstanding. It's also got a great range
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of brightness. And running a running a stock Android device was really
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refreshing for me because I run an HTC1, which is using Sense um and I've never
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actually used a stock Android device before. So, there you go. That's my
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impressions overall of the Shield. I don't really see myself using the whole
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uh tag thing here, but you you can if you want. Also, oh yes, this is an
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accessory that I sort of recommend picking up. This is their carry case,
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which has a nice hard shell to it, so it's going to protect it if you're
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traveling around with it. It's got a little, you know, plug at the back that
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allows you to charge the device even when it's inside. Comes with a little
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wrist strap, and the overall feel is is very rugged. There's little carrying
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pouches up here on the top. The one reason why I wouldn't recommend picking
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it up, because otherwise I really, really would. It's quite nice, is that I
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didn't find myself traveling with Shield much, by the time you've got the case
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and the Shield, it's quite bulky and quite heavy. So, I found myself using it
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at home more than out and about. When I was out and about, though, it was kind
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of cool because you get some uh you get kind of a couple double takes. It's
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like, "Oh, what what is he playing on?" I personally do believe that devices
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like this are the future of mobile gaming with an open platform versus, you
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know, oh well, when we decide to release a new console, there will be a whole new
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slew of games. We will re-release everything or we won't re-release everything and you will like it. Um,
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having something that behaves more like a PC where we can get hardware upgrades
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as they come. We can play the entire back library of games and expect new
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games to come. This is the future. But right now, the game library is
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relatively small. However, that brings us to the game streaming experience.
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NVIDIA's whole claim to fame with this device, other than the fact that you can
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run any Android game pretty much. I was running GTA Vice City on it, which has a
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lot of warnings when you install it. Oh, don't run anything else at the same time. Turn the graphic details down if
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it's not running correctly. It ran like a dream on this thing. No difficulty
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whatsoever. It's my first time playing it, too, so I've spent a fair bit of time on that. But anyway, the game
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streaming is how they are planning to augment the slightly smaller subset of
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Android games that do have full controller support and will work just
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fine. And in my experience, man, is it awesome. Now, we did do the whole ghetto
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shield thing where we were using Splashtop and we did show that it can be
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done. Um, but I think what you guys are going to see with some of the slow
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motion footage I'm going to be showing you is that NVIDIA Shield really does
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deliver a nearly latencyfree experience.
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So, we took this slow motion footage at 480 frames per second, which means if
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you really felt like it, you could slow down the footage and you could find out
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exactly how many milliseconds of extra
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delay the wireless connection is adding.
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Um, but what's really going to stand out more than anything else is how close it
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is to the gaming grade 120 Hz monitor behind it. And now we're going to shift
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over to our Ghetto Shield with Splashtop that not only is not running as high
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resolution. So it's 640x480 instead of 1280 by 720. Although it still looks
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great on a 4 4.7 in screen. Like let's be really clear about that. It still
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looks fine. Uh so it's lower resolution. You obviously get less battery life cuz
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you're using your phone. You obviously have to like bolt it to something in order to have it be a great experience.
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And there's all these things, but the latency is not even close. We found we
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could play games with the Ghetto Shield, but it's uh easy to play games with the
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proper Shield. Not only that, but the experience of getting Shield running is
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much more seamless. With the Ghetto Shield, you have to manually configure
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your desktop resolution. It'll only work with games that are able to run in full
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screen windowed mode. And there's a bunch of caveats like that. With the
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Shield, you press the big NVIDIA button in the middle, which brings up your
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Tegra optimized games, your Shield Store, and aha, your PC games. It
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launches Steam. It changes the resolution for you, gives you a bunch of
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clues as to to what gestures you can use, and then boom, it gives you a games
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list. So, we used Borderlands 2 and Crisis to validate that things were
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working correctly. Crisis was the one that being an older title, it streamed
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great, it looked great, but you can really tell the HUD elements aren't
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optimized for it. There's a lot of key bindings that are designed for mouse and
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keyboard, so there wasn't really a corresponding button that made any
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sense. Um, it's not Yeah. So, it wasn't
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perfect, but it looked great and it was very playable. Not having auto aim when
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you're relying on using a controller is definitely a disadvantage. Um, but
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Borderlands 2 was a fantastic experience. And this, I think, really
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makes my point about how well how the
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experience differs from something where you're manually setting things up every
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time. You can be anywhere in your house and running this and not really thinking
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about what's going on in your PC unless someone happens to be on it. It should
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be noted that your PC does display video while you're gaming on the Shield, but
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it doesn't play audio. So, it only pushes audio to the Shield instead of
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just your speakers being blaring anytime you're anywhere else in your house
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gaming on the device. Now, wireless, you
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can't just use any old run-of-the-mill $29.99 Best Buy special wireless router.
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It's not going to work. You want to get a decent wireless router. You can check
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out the list of recommended ones on NVIDIA.com. We found that there were
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routers that worked just fine even from a a floor away um such as the EA4500
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that was not on the list, but you need a strong concurrent dualband router. So
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that is 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz at the same
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time because the wireless solution on the NVIDIA Shield is excellent and
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that's part of what makes the technology work so well. So I think that pretty
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much wraps it up for everything I wanted to say about it. Is it a recommended buy
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at $299? Hard to say because much like
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any other console, it depends on the game library. So if you look at that
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Android library and you go, "Yeah, sure. That's worth it to me. I'm I'm game."
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Then great. That's that's perfect for you. If you look at that library and you
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go, "That's not good enough, but oh, I have a PC library that I can use to
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augment it. I think I'll use this a lot around my house." Then then that might
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be good enough for you, too. If you don't have an Android device at all, I
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actually found I'd used it a lot just for watching videos on Netflix or even
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replying to emails when I'm just out and about and it happened to be the closest
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thing to me. I mean, the touchcreen is excellent. Uh there are some there are a
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few sort of UI things that are weird like apps that are expecting to be
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running on a phone when they're running on a low resolution device and are
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optimized for portrait and don't really switch to landscape very well. Some of those were kind of funny. I'm like using
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it like this. But overall, it was it was
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a good usage experience. Um, other than
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other than that UI weirdness, would I recommend it for 300? You know what?
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It's your call. But I understand why it costs 300. It has the latest Tegra 4
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processor, which is extremely fast. It really does feel like a very buttery
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smooth Android experience. everything you're doing, whether it's graphics or
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the CPU itself, and you look at how much something like a phone costs. This is
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everything a phone is and more in some ways, except it doesn't happen to have a
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wireless connection for mobile data. That's the only real difference here.
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You know, like no camera on the back and stuff like that. But there's a lot of engineering that went into building this
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thing and it's expensive to make. I think 300 is reasonable in terms of the
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hardware. And I think I've rambled quite enough. Leave a like if you like this
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video. Leave a dislike if you disliked it. and leave a comment. Let me know, do
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you think the future of mobile gaming is portable devices like this that run on
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an open platform? Even if maybe NVIDIA Shield isn't the one, maybe it's
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something that's a little bit more pocketable. I don't know. You tell me.