NVIDIA have just announced their plans to bring an Android-powered handheld gaming unit to market in the near future. Unveiled at CES today, Project Shield is a handheld gaming unit that runs vanilla Android (yay!) with NVIDIA’s own Tegra 4 doing all the computing work. Google apps are included as well as access to the Play Store, and of course, NVIDIA’s own Tegra Zone gaming store.
NVIDIA says the unit — which features a 33Wh battery — will play games with PC graphics for 5 to 10 hours, and can playback video for 24 hours. That huge battery will also be charged by the industry standard MicroUSB connector.
The screen is 5-inch at 1280×720 and is completely multitouch capable. The device itself is in a clamshell form-factor with the screen folding on top of what essentially looks like an XBOX 360 controller. Storage won’t be much of an issue with the inclusion of a Micro SD slot — expandable up to 64GB.
PC Game Streaming…
Another impressive feature of Project Shield is its ability to stream PC games from a user’s PC to the handheld unit. The technology behind the wireless gaming is a variant on the normal Wi-Fi standard meaning it will work on existing Wi-Fi networks.
Project Shield will connect to Steam and stream a user’s games directly to the handheld unit.
There’s an obvious question to be asked about this feature: what about lag between the handheld unit and the PC? Well NVIDIA says it has been working hard to ensure lag is at a minimum so as not to affect the user experience.
No word yet on a release date or price. If it’s announced, we’ll let you know!
Seems like we’re seeing a lot of these Android gaming devices lately. I don’t know that any of them will really take off as a market-leading console, but if the games work on all of them, it shouldn’t matter which you get.
Anyone who tries to lock their device to a proprietary app store is doomed, but nvidia should know better.
Indeed they do, the article says it has access to the Google play store AND the NVIDIA store! Best of both worlds, and if it’s vanilla android would it not also support side loaded apk’s from an SD card with no market? Who wants a PS Vista? But will it get the PS certification to play the PS games?
Such an odd creation. I have no idea if it’s brilliant or doomed.
If it comes with stock vanilla Android then I’d definitely love it.
*drool* I want it
Pretty cool.