In November, the Google-branded HTC Nexus 9 arrived in a spanking-new Lollipop-shaped cradle, giving Google a chance to reaffirm that, hey, you want to own an Android tablet. But things didn’t quite work out that way. The Lollipop OS update wasn’t the problem; rather, Nexus 9’s mix of high price, unremarkable hardware, and so-so performance added up to something decidedly less than a “statement” device, like Nexus models past, and hopes for Android’s iPad killer faded quickly.

Specs at a glance: Nvidia Shield Tablet Screen 1920×1200 8" (283 PPI) IPS LCD OS Android 5.0 Lollipop CPU Tegra K1 quad-core 2.2GHz Cortex-A15 RAM 2GB GPU Nvidia 192-core Kepler Storage 16GB or 32GB (plus up to 128GB micro-SD card) Networking 802.11n 2x2 Mimo 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, optional LTE (Bands 2, 4, 5, 7, 17) Ports Micro-USB, headphone, mini HDMI Camera 5MP rear camera, 5MP front camera Size 8.8" × 5" × 0.36" (221 x 126 x 9.1 mm) Weight 13.7oz (390g) Battery 19.75 Wh (non-removable) Starting price $299

Since then, Lollipop has spread pretty far and wide on newer hardware models, but one of the very first to get the official OS upgrade treatment was an unexpected choice: the Nvidia Shield Tablet.

This gaming-first device got lost in the 2014 tablet shuffle, which we blame on a few factors. For one, Android has yet to prove itself as a hardcore gaming OS, as evidenced by underwhelming micro-consoles like the Ouya and Amazon Fire, so its allure as a gaming device didn’t catch fire. Worse, Nvidia’s device suffered delays, and it shared its name with last year’s bulky, cheap-feeling, and disappointing Nvidia Shield Portable.

But after the Nexus 9 failed to reignite the Android tablet sector, we began looking elsewhere for a commendable, medium-sized Android device that launched this year, and, at least on paper, we were intrigued by the Nvidia Shield Tablet’s price, stylus integration, and use of a Tegra K1 processor a 32-bit quad-core version, not the 64-bit dual core version in the pricier Nexus 9). Once the tablet received its November Lollipop upgrade, we snapped up a Shield Tablet of our own to see how its fancy-sounding innards and sleek design felt for both work and play purposes.

We’re pretty confident that this won’t become a portable gaming behemoth to dethrone the likes of the PlayStation Vita, but the Shield is no one-trick pony. In the wake of Android’s generally weak 2014 tablet lineup, did this $300 gamer-minded device wind up taking the year-end cake after all?

It's just so... black!

If this tablet didn’t have the word “SHIELD” written on its matte back in all-caps, you might never know it was related to last year’s clamshell “portable microconsole.” The Shield Tablet’s body doesn’t come in a strange shape or have any other distinctive branding—not even the trademark neon-green accents that Nvidia loves so much.































Instead, Shield Tablet buyers can expect a simple, all-black, big-rectangle tablet look, with average bezels around the screen’s edge, and front-facing speaker columns flanking the shorter sides. Black matte plastic wraps around the entire device, actually, with the exception of a single, black aluminum ring around the front of the body that adds a little shine, but, really, this thing is black. It's also a little thick and heavy for its size class; this has been the year of thin tablets, and 9.1 mm seems like a thickness measure from last year's best sets.

If you want the Shield Tablet to look good, turn on the 8-inch, 16:10 screen and take a look at the stunning 1920x1200 display—just a smidge over 1080p, with pixel density at around 283 PPI. Color reproduction and black depth looked pretty impressive for the midrange price, and Netflix movies came off as incredibly crisp (particularly the watercolor effects in the animated series Bojack Horseman). We looked at this screen next to a Macbook Pro Retina display and noticed that blues could have been deeper, and reds had a slight orange tint, but that’s normal stuff for an IPS display, and a quick jump into the settings revealed that the Shield Tablet employs a pretty effective RGB color correction preset; turn it off, and the screen turns Smurf blue.

The front-facing speakers are joined by a pair of miniature subwoofer “reflex ports” on the tablet’s shorter sides, and the speaker combo held up as expected to our test of Lil’ Jon’s “Turn Down For What”—meaning, they project a distinct bit of volume and bass for things like movie watching, and individual instruments sound distinct enough, but they’re not loud or booming enough to rattle your car’s windows by any stretch.

Then there’s the matter of ports, ports, ports: beyond the usual micro-USB and microphone ports, the Shield Tablet also includes a mini-HDMI out, a micro SD slot (supporting up to 128 GB in additional memory), and—if you opt for the more expensive LTE model—a SIM card slot. The flexible plastic cover for each of the latter two felt a little cheap, and we couldn’t actually get the SIM slot covered properly for a few days. The power and volume rockers don’t protrude far enough, so we had to press down pretty hard for both to respond, which was unfortunate.

Jot your Shield

The Shield Tablet’s edge hides one other interesting bonus: a 4.5-inch stylus slot. Pluck the so-called “DirectStylus” out with a fingernail, and the screen will bring up a custom app launcher with pre-loaded, stylus-first apps like Evernote, JusWrite, and Nvidia Dabbler. They’re all pretty much the same, in terms of giving users a canvas on which to write and draw as they please.















The no-battery DirectStylus was sturdy and comfortable enough in our writing hand, and we only needed a few minutes to adjust to its angled tip. Though the device offers some pressure sensitivity, especially in its impressive, effects-loaded Nvidia Dabbler app, users are more often expected to turn the stylus’ tip around to switch between fine and broad strokes. We liked that system, as it assured us that pressing a little too hard wouldn’t create giant blots in our digital pen strokes, but serious tablet artists who prefer a pressure-sensitive pen may not come away as satisfied.

However, Nvidia didn’t go so far as to deliver an app suite that we’d bother yanking this stylus out for, as opposed to jotting and doodling with our fingers on a touch screen. None of the pre-loaded apps enabled a never-ending handwriting scroll on which we could jot and write lengthy notes, and unlike Adobe’s free Sketch app, they also didn’t enable larger-scale zooming and pinching; that makes it harder to create full, interconnected comic strips, for example.

That being said, the lag for our pen strokes to appear on the screen was quite minimal for a no-battery stylus, and Nvidia did create a handwriting-recognition system that loads when using the stylus in apps like Gmail. We were impressed with how well that worked when composing e-mails; we just had to adjust our chicken-scratch strokes to give the app actual letters (print, not cursive) to comprehend, at which point we could write quickly and with ease. The only exception came because Gmail, unlike other stylus-friendly apps, would sometimes react to our palm resting on the bottom of the screen, which the stylus mode is supposed to disable. We’d love to see Nvidia patch this accidental-tap issue for more apps.

This stylus-powered tablet may never become an artist’s primary device, but responsive sketching and decent handwriting recognition make this a pretty easy recommendation for an on-the-go dabbler with a tablet upgrade on his or her mind.

The Kepler effect

Right, we’ve said quite a bit about an Nvidia device without mentioning games, which may very well drive Nvidia’s fans (and staff) nuts up to this point. Time to break down this device’s performance benchmarks:



















Quite frankly, single-core performance is the pits compared to other modern tablets. The iPad Airs and Nexus 9 focus on having fewer, faster cores rather than more, slower cores, so single-threaded tasks won't be as fast on the Shield as they are elsewhere.

We assume this contributes to the Shield Tablet’s occasional snags and hangups during general Web browsing and app switching, which we also noticed when testing the similar Nexus 9 hardware. Much has been said about performance boosts thanks to the OS’ switch to Android Runtime (ART), but, at least in this high-powered device’s case, we haven’t seen those changes result in across-the-board ultra-snappy performance. That doesn’t mean the Shield Tablet is a general-use slouch, but we’ll get to its worst issues in a bit.

Multi-core performance, meanwhile, gets us somewhere far closer to the likes of the Nexus 9, with lower integer results and higher floating point numbers than in HTC’s tablet. The quad-core K1 certainly has muscle to flex, backed by 2GB of memory and a 192-core Kepler GPU, and its floating point results are the good stuff in the gaming world, borne out by a white-hot Manhattan test result in GFXBench 3. If you haven’t seen that visual benchmark test, it is packed with particle and lighting effects up the wazoo, and the Shield Tablet doesn’t flinch at them.





We’ve complained in other recent high-powered Android device reviews that the OS still doesn’t have many high-end games to test such powerful devices with. Nvidia’s tablet comes packed with a Shield-only edition of the graphically intense Trine 2, a lovely character-swapping side-scroller that recalls the puzzling glory of The Lost Vikings with physics effects and a ton of visual polish. It also runs quite smoothly, but it’s the exception to an Android gaming marketplace full of PlayStation 2-era graphics, meaning low-poly characters, blurry textures, simple lighting, and other rudimentary effects. Thus, saying that the Shield Tablet is “one of the best” Android gaming devices mostly comes down to wishful thinking about how many higher-powered games will land on Google Play in the near future.

In the Shield Tablet’s favor, at least, it plays nicely with Bluetooth controllers, along with the Shield Wireless Controller, a $60 device that works only with the Shield Tablet and Shield Portable because it communicates not by Bluetooth, but by Wi-Fi. The biggest benefit it offers is smooth audio streaming; connect headphones directly to the controller, and you’ll hear all of your Shield Tablet’s audio without any stuttering or crackling.

















Otherwise, it’s another “just like the Xbox 360 controller” controller, though it’s a significant improvement over the buttons and joysticks built into the Shield Portable. It offers a tiny touchpad surface if you’re too lazy to get up and tap the screen; other than that, get ready for dependable joysticks, a relatively responsive D-pad, and slightly cheap-feeling triggers.

Gently down the streams

Should you enter the Shield Hub app, you’ll be directed to a number of gaming options, including a list of Shield-optimized games to purchase from the Google Play store and two cloud-streaming options. The first one, PC streaming, works if you own a compatible wireless router and a high-end Windows gaming PC with a compatible Nvidia GeForce video card (which we happened to have handy). Put those all together, and you’ll be able to stream your own computer’s games from any WiFi router—so long as Nvidia’s “GeForce Experience” management software finds and supports them.

The app combs any “games” folders that you direct it to, then tells your Shield Tablet that they’re available. Steam as a general app will load this way in Big Picture mode, as well, but just because a game appears in Steam doesn’t mean the Shield Tablet will render it properly. Some games loaded this way will appear as black screens, while others won’t load in proper full-screen mode, even though the games may appear to be playing just fine on your computer monitor down the hall.

In our home office, streaming games this way introduced tolerable latency, but nothing as efficient as, say, PlayStation Now streaming services. We also left our home PC on while testing this across town, and while we were able to load games, the latency and dropped frames proved absolutely unbearable.

Nvidia’s “Grid” cloud-gaming service is also an option, and currently, it offers 26 games to play for free, streamed from its server farm to your Shield Tablet, with no signs that Nvidia will start charging for them any time soon. The selection doesn’t have much in the way of ultra-new content; rather, it’s the kind of past-two-years fare you’ve seen in Humble Bundle sales, like Saint’s Row The Third and Red Faction Armageddon. Still, they’re not a bad free bonus, and we managed to play the twitchy Ultra Street Fighter IV with tolerable amounts of lag, so we’re not scoffing at what Nvidia has pulled off with Grid at this point.













Here’s quite the gimmick: whether you’re playing a native Android game, streaming through a cloud service, or doing normal tablet tasks like doodling in a stylus-powered sketch app or browsing the Web, you can stream your activity to Twitch. That option is one of the key root-level differences between this tablet and vanilla Lollipop, as you can toggle Twitch streaming options at any time from the pull-down notifications menus. The implementation is pretty smooth, as it allows casters to record their face and voice via the Shield Tablet’s front-facing camera and microphones (and use their fingers to drag camera and chat windows around the display, even letting them hold their fingers down to pick those elements’ opacity in the UI).

However, this was far from perfect in action. When using simple apps like a Web browser or a sketchpad, Twitch streaming worked just fine, both on our end and for viewers. However, casting a 3D game resulted in a lot of dropped frames and patchy audio, just after we’d run a bandwidth test and found our upload numbers to be quite beefy for such uploading purposes.

Worse, if we tried to switch apps while Twitch was streaming, the whole works got gummed up. Apps would pause, freeze, or outright crash regularly in such a situation. Our best results came from staying put within one app and disabling video upload.

Wrapping up

You don’t get an impressive rear-facing camera in the Shield Tablet; the 5MP cam takes a decent shot in a pinch, but it’s neither particularly quick to shoot nor all that impressive with fast-motion shots. Thankfully, the Shield Tablet upgraded the front-facing camera from the usual 720p throwaway option to another 5MP camera—one whose camera app supports HDR, at that—which we love for video chats and the like. However, its positioning is not ideal for landscape mode, which is the device’s usual position when playing games (let alone casting them), so you’ll have to prop it up to avoid a weird bottom-side angle of your chin.

Battery life is a little weak for a small tablet in a non-stop Wi-Fi test, nearly reaching seven hours, but we were more concerned with general device drain when we had the Shield Tablet turned off and taken around on the go; once we saw the issue and set a timer, we found a battery loss of about 25 percent when we left the device untouched for four hours.

Optimized or Max? We dug around in the Nvidia Shield Tablet's menus to find a “processor mode” toggle that offered “optimized” and “max performance” options. The device defaults to the lighter “optimized” option. After boosting the power, we received a 0.7 frames-per-second boost to our Manhattan on-screen test in GFXBench and a 0.3 frames-per-second boost to its off-screen results, so it certainly helps, but our Geekbench and Web testing numbers remained largely unchanged, so the "max" mode won't otherwise make the tablet scream during general multitasking.

We couldn’t determine the actual cause for this drain, and this has been a complaint among Shield Tablet owners since its summer 2014 launch, so it’s sad to see the upgrade to Lollipop didn’t address this drain issue. Worse, the Lollipop update appears to have removed options in the “Shield Power Control” menu to reduce power use and block background processes from running.

Otherwise, this is a solid vanilla Lollipop tablet—no real bloatware or Android forkage to speak of—and our biggest usability complaints came from the stutters and app freezes that occasionally popped up while switching between Web and multimedia apps. Based on similar issues with the K1-powered Nexus 9, we think Nvidia has a little more work to do in terms of Android optimization. In the meantime, the hitches aren't deal breakers, but this isn’t as super-smooth a device as its impressive 3D rendering numbers might lead you to believe.

So long as you can stomach the thickness and hold out hope for a patch to resolve its slight performance issues—and hellish battery drain—this is your best 2014 bang-for-the-buck tablet option by a long shot, whether you game or not.

The good

Stellar gaming specs for the price

Stylus option adds surprisingly solid sketch and handwriting options to vanilla Android

Bright, sharp screen matched with solid speaker-subwoofer combo

Built-in Twitch streaming functionality is first of its kind for a tablet

Free cloud-streaming game options work with minimal latency issues

The bad

Stuttering and pauses between app switches are too common

Twitch functions hog system resources, are particularly finicky

Unremarkable all-black, mostly plastic design isn't ugly but won't turn any heads

Not all apps disable touch sensing during stylus mode

Touch-to-press power button makes us miss the Nexus 9's tap-to-power function

Your gaming rig and Wi-Fi router must play nicely with Nvidia's recommendations

The ugly