Nvidia’s not a company that’s known for the production of consumer electronics, but it has been dabbling over the last couple of years with the handheld Shield gaming console and the Tegra Note 7 tablet. Now it looks like the company is combining the two to form the latest version of the Shield.
Rumors of a new Nvidia-made tablet surfaced back in May, when a mystery device named Mocha showed up on GFXBench. The specs described a 7.9-inch tablet with a 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution, 2GB of RAM, and Nvidia’s new Tegra K1 SoC. Now, @evleaks has posted an image of what purports to be the Shield Tablet.
Though there’s little in the way of new information to go on, the tablet has a HTC One M8 vibe to it, with front-facing speakers on the top and bottom of the device and a metallic grey finish.
This is a huge departure from the original Shield in terms of design. The whole point of the first Shield was that gaming on the go doesn’t have to mean giving up your controller. The device featured a 5-inch display mounted on a full-size controller and could stream games from your PC. What’s not clear is if this tablet truly is the evolution of the Shield or just another product in the Shield family.
Current rumors have the Shield 2 pegged for a July unveiling, so we likely don’t have long to wait before we find out what Nvidia’s going to do with the brand.
Update: Well, just a couple of hours after Nvidia teased us all with a website dedicated to ‘THE ULTIMATE IS COMING’ and an accompanying countdown timer that runs until Tuesday, the cat is out of the bag. Actually, all of the cats. There are no cats left in any bags. Videocardz.com has everything you need to know about Nvidia’s upcoming Shield Tablet right now.
The post confirms previous rumours of a Tegra K1 SoC packing 192 CUDA cores and a quad-core 2.2 GHz A15 CPU, as well as 2 GB of RAM. It also reveals that we can expect an 8-inch IPS display with a 1920 x 1080 resolution, 16 GB/32 GB of storage (the 32 GB model also has LTE), Bluetooth 4.0, MicroSD (up to 128 GB) and a wireless controller. The controller will be sold separately, for $59, and the 16 GB version of the tablet will be priced at $299. If you’re willing to part with an extra hundred bucks, you’ll get the 32 GB LTE model, which is unlocked and compatible with AT&T or T-Mobile in the United States. Just know that with the controller on top of that, you’re looking at more than $450 for this device.
Of course, this is a Shield device at heart, so the controller will work with the Shield Tablet or the Shield Console and the tablet also comes with Nvidia Gamestream, Nvidia Shadowplay, and GRID Cloud Gaming Beta, as well as Console Mode, GamePad Mapper, and Nvidia’s TegraZone.
Nvidia will be repeating all of this information as though it’s new this coming Tuesday.
[source]@evleaks[/source]
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