The NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet Review
by Joshua Ho on July 29, 2014 9:00 AM ESTFinal Words
If I’m honest, it’s hard for me to review tablets. While I academically understand why people like tablets, I’ve never really found a use for them. They’re less comfortable to use in bed than a phone, I usually can’t type on a tablet as quickly as I do on a phone due to the size and weight, and in general it’s hard to justify a tablet when a phone is generally much more versatile. So when I got the Shield Tablet, I didn’t really know what to expect. While I have a Shield Portable, I don’t spend much time gaming on it, especially when I have a desktop that can do it much better. I came away from my experience pleasantly surprised.
Over the past five days, I’ve learned a lot about this device. As a tablet, it’s good. The material design and industrial design is acceptable and the device itself is quite ergonomic but it doesn’t blow me away. However, given the need to meet cost constraints, the matte plastic feel is really all that’s necessary and I don’t have any complaints in this area.
In the other fundamentals, we see a bit of a checkered pattern. In the display, the static contrast is quite high, and the calibration is good, but the gamut of the display doesn’t cover sRGB. This would definitely be an area that should be improved for the next generation. Although there are some compelling reasons to go with smaller color gamut, it ends up as a disadvantage when compared to other general-purpose tablets. The display is still perfectly usable, but it's a bit more washed out than I'd like.
In battery life, we see that the Shield Tablet ends up doing relatively well in web browsing, but for intensive gaming the tablet can’t spend much time away from an outlet before draining the battery completely. This is likely to be an unavoidable tradeoff, given the immense amounts of performance that Tegra K1 provides versus the power costs of doing so on a 28nm process. Anyone that has lived with a gaming laptop should understand this. As said before, it’s also possible to improve battery life from the 2.5 hour figure if the game is light enough to allow the GPU to run at lower frequencies. Barring that, NVIDIA has included options to cap the maximum frame rate of the display and reduce maximum CPU frequencies.
Otherwise the only other notable difficulty I’ve run into is with the stylus. Generally speaking it works well enough, but the stylus requires a bit more lift between words than I’m used to and keeping it from feeling fully natural. But I will be the first to admit that this is a minor issue at best.
Outside of the tablet itself, the gaming features are compelling. The larger 8” display and massively improved SoC on the Shield Tablet made for a far better gaming experience than what I had on Shield Portable. There’s a great deal of potential in ShadowPlay on a tablet, as while screen recording is nothing new in PCs this feature is often difficult to enable on Android. This is before we talk about the effects that live video encoding has on UI performance. ShadowPlay has managed to enable easy screen recording on a mobile device and do so without significantly impacting performance.
Meanwhile GameStream and GRID are even better on the larger screen that the tablet provides. While it was cool to play PC games on the Shield Portable, the size of the display simply made some elements too small to reasonably see. Now, there are no such issues. GameStream and GRID are definitely a lot of fun to use, especially if the game is well-adapted to playing on a controller.
Ultimately though, I feel that the native game library is the most important aspect of this device. While there are plenty of solid single player games, multiplayer games are few and far between. I still feel that multiplayer is where Shield has the strongest potential because it makes the difference between tens of hours per game and hundreds, even thousands of hours per game. There are definitely signs that this aspect of the ecosystem will improve in the near future as Trine 2 supports local multiplayer and War Thunder on Shield Tablet should be able to play online against console and PC players.
After getting through all of these observations over the past five days, I’ve come to realize that even though it’s not the perfect tablet, all of the features that this device brings to the table right now would be enough for me to seriously consider buying one. If NVIDIA manages to get enough multiplayer titles with an active community on Shield Tablet, there wouldn’t be a need to stop and consider at all. As someone that has spent the past few years never considering a tablet purchase at all, the Shield Tablet is the first ARM tablet that I would seriously think about buying.
The SHIELD Tablet is 299 USD for the 16GB WiFi model, 399 USD for the 32 GB LTE model. Each controller is 59.99 USD and the cover is 39.99 USD. While the 16GB model is 70 dollars more expensive than the Nexus 7 equivalent, the gap narrows to 50 dollars for the 32GB LTE model. Given the sheer amount of utility that this device brings to the table, the pricing is definitely set at the right place.
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sherlockwing - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
If and only if you are color blind.Moizy - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Crappy? It's no iPad Air or Nexus 7, but it's still good. Read Josh's article from the other day where he went back to the archives and tested smartphone panels that were once awesome in their day. Just 3 years ago we were praising the contrast of SAMOLED and the great resolutions those phones had. The Shield Tablet is leaps and bounds ahead of them, in accuracy, gamut, and pixel density, and just a tier below the iPad Airs and Nexus 7s of the world. For $300 and all this tablet can do, I would highly recommend this tablet to most anyone, and still plan on getting one for work and graduate school.boozed - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
After reading "crappy" I was expecting a much worse result than the reality expressed in the review, so that's an exaggeration.I wouldn't be surprised if this screen still outperforms the majority of desktop gaming monitors out of the box.
edlee - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
this soc it a powerhouse, nvidia is stupid that they do not mass produce it for mass produced products from HTC and Samsung. They made tablet GPU that is faster than Intel HD4000, which is pretty significant.But Nvidia doesn't have enough brand cognition for the simple consumer to know this is a killer product, not sure why you dont hear more partners for this soc.
melgross - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
They do, but few manufacturers seem to want their SoC's.johnny_boy - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
I don't get why since they make a pretty damn compelling SoC. Sure, previous generations weren't very exciting, but those were previous generations!phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
Fool me once (Tegra1), shame on me.Fool me twice (Tegra2), shame on you.
Fool me thrice (Tegra3), screw you!
Fool me a fourth time (Tegra4), I'll never listen to you again.
After all the hypocrisy and broken promises and what not from nVidia from the previous generations, is it really any wonder that no one wants to trust them again? All the big phone/tablet manufacturers are going to sit out this round and let nVidia go it alone. Maybe some smaller vendors will nibble at the line, and maybe some of them will have some successes with Tegra K1. But you won't see any major vendors using Tegra K1 until it proves itself in the market.
If nVidia hadn't burned so many bridges with Tegras 1-3 they'd be in a better position to take on Qualcomm, Samsung, ARM, and Intel. But, even with how good this SoC may be, it's still too little, too late.
Don't screw over your customers if you want them to be repeat customers!
TheJian - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
You're mistaken. It was the only thing at google IO. In their automotive, their developer device (tango), TV, and it seems nexus tablet coming for gamers (9in IIRC).Too little too late? ROFL. It dominated the 805 and everything else here. Right on time is more like it. It will be in Google's Nov HTC Nexus 9 tablet at least. Mipad from xaiomi, Lenovo Thinkvision AIO 28, of course Jetson dev board also. I'm guessing A shield R2 coming shortly too with 1440x810 as the other specs that floated around showed (which clearly isn't this tablet, and it supposedly has 4GB ram, so again not this device). Small volumes right now probably prevent a dual launch of both shield products or they may wait for Denver since there is already quite a bit of interested parties using it as noted. If all you can produce goes to the above mentioned devices shield 2 may have to wait a bit.
akdj - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Unfortunately, when ya want the 'power'. The promise of the 'performance'. And probably most importantly in today's mass market, it's 'efficiency'. Sure, they're flat hauling ASS in these benchmarks @ full tilt but a couple hours off the wall and you're done (with a AAA game that's the main draw to this tablet, right? --- I can't imagine the 'power' browser, or super reader or the 'AA' games I'm enjoying , Dark Room, The Room. Sometimes ya die. Maybe some car racing and if I've got the time an RPG FPS or an MMO, it's rare. In fact with my nine year old son it's 'his' time on my iDevices playing the games, the AA games that kick incredible ass but aren't AAA because they're not in a computer, console or dedicated gaming system. Laughable. I'm 43 and Ultima, Myst and Diablo A & B. Not the latest. Those were my games. Ultima online, I don't have the time nor do most 'tablet clients'. This is a niche product and an SoC with extreme limitations if you're taxing it's power. Obviously, using it as a movie watching, media browsing and light productivity....it's amazing efficiency. But, argument of color aside....we are moving to a HiDPI world with excellent color production on phones, tablets computers and TVs/4k, et al. If the screen is subjectively by the author after objective measurements confirming it.... 'Washed out' sounds lame. So does a pair of hours if I want to game a bit while on a three plus hour flight. A8 from Apple, Quallcomm NAND their 64bit architecture, significantly deeper libraries of apps, games and general interest software, Apple and Samsung, nor Google or ASUS, HTC LG or ABC going to take this risk again and it's exactly that. A speed demon you're unable to take advantage of if you're away for a charger. And a tablet plugged in = a major PITA. SoCs have to strike a balance. And with Metal/A8/Continuity and Google's response to come. Samsung's readying the new Note 4. Possible 805? With the 420, it'll fly through a helluva lot of games. And it's display is going to best the best today. The S5 from the same family. AMOLED has come a long way. IPS display with 'washed out' colors isn't appealing.akdj - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
No edit. Wasn't supposed to be Quallcom's NAND. Rather Qualcomm and their 64 bit response to second generation 64bit A8. Cool and exciting to have the completion but yeah, burned three times it was tough to trust a fourth gen to leave the shelf without the reliability of ARM, Snapdragon and the 'A' series Apple tweaked ARM SoCs. Both dedicated AND delivering with incredible improvements. Look at Note 1-->Note 3's benches. iPhone 4-->5s. Two years and mind bending speed, efficiency and even more software ('apps') then before with more possibilities. Intel now in w/BayTrail, I'm wishing nVidia the best. I'm a fan