Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By gadgetsteria (Reporter)
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

Nvidia Announces 5-Inch “Project Shield” Mobile Gaming System

Sunday, January 6, 2013 23:50

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Nvidia announced their next-gen mobile SoC, Tegra 4, tonight during the pre-show events for CES 2013 as most assumed they would. What almost everyone didn’t expect, however, was Nvidia unveiling their own mobile gaming system. But that’s exactly what they just did.

“Project Shield” as it’s called features a clamshell design with a 5-inch 720p display (294ppi) built into the lid and an array of buttons not too far removed from an Xbox controller on the bottom half. Power is provided by the newly announced Tegra 4 which features a quad-core CPU along with a 5th low power core for battery savings. (According to Nvidia, the Tegra 4 will push out 4K video over HDMI.) Longevity is made possible by a 33Wh battery. A microSD card slot allows additional storage.

What’s noteworthy, though, is that Nvidia is using Android to power Project Shield. And it’s not just any “normal” skinned Android experience. Nvidia is giving us pure Android free of any skin that unnecessarily.

But the best feature of all is hands down the local streaming from your PC. Yup. That’s right. You can stream games from your PC to the Project Shield device (via WiFi) as long as your source computer is equipped with a GTX 650 or higher. Sadly, remote streaming is not supported.

Nvidia will be supporting both the stock Google Play store (and its apps/games) as well as their own Tegra Zone, and will ship with Google’s branded services.

Currently, Nvidia won’t pin down an exact date, simply pointing us to some time in Q2 for an undisclosed price.

We’re not really sold on yet another console, especially an Android one. But Project Shield is definitely one of the more intriguing attempts yet.

Gallery