What happened to the Nvidia Shield Portable, one of the first consoles with Android

The history of Android consoles is very interesting and often the result is not what its developers expected. We have already seen what happened with OUYA, the Android console that was going to eat the market and ended up devouredbut this is only one example.

Another is Nvidia Shield, another Android portable console that did not achieve the goal I expected, but for completely different reasons than OUYA. In fact, I’m convinced that if it had come out now, it would have had its place in the market. Afterwards, let’s see what happened to Nvidia Shield Portable.

2013: we hadn’t seen anything like it, and it made sense because Nvidia was ahead of the future

2010 was a weird time for desktops and laptops. It gave the feeling that each company was doing its own thing, not caring too much about what the rival was doing. The Xbox 360 started tinkering with Kinect, the PlayStation 3 with the Move, but also with traditional big bets, Nintendo had its Wii U ready for 2012 and the PS Vita also saw the light of day in 2012.

In addition to the “traditional” industry, if you can call it that, streaming gaming has started to emerge. Currently we see streaming from any platform as a daily thing (Microsoft, in fact, just took it a step further by joining Nvidia GeForce Now), but in 2013 things weren’t so easy.

There was Gaikai and OnLive (which went on to create PlayStation Now), but the time was not right. And, apart from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, it seems that Nvidia was tired of being “only” the one who supplied the GPU of the most powerful Xbox 360s, PS3s and PCs of the time: it wanted its share of the cake. . If the consoles sold millions, why couldn’t Nvidia get a foothold in the market?

Thus, in mid-2013, the company has launched a curious portable console: Nvidia Shield. For the time, and compared to the most powerful mobiles, Shield was another generation. With a quad-core Cortex-A15 processor clocked at 1.9GHz, 2GB of DDR3L RAM, and a custom GPU, the Shield was impressive.

The heart of the Tegra 4 was spectacular, but the screen was not bad at all. Five inches with 720p resolution, miniHDMI output, 5 GHz connectivity and a full control console attached to the screen. By its concept and its power, it left any mobile phone of the time in its infancy.

I had Android, so all games from the Play Store were compatible, and… do you remember the games in the Store at that time? Yes, there was one that was saved, but the best mobile was “Infinity Blade” and was exclusive to Apple. And if there are no games to justify the purchase, what is all that power for?

Normally when I talk about a device’s past I don’t get to the first nail in the coffin so soon, and in this case I won’t say that Shield was dead before he was born, but if we do not take into account stage and emulators, there was not much to play.

Nvidia had TegraZone where there were interesting games, but the most interesting thing was precisely the connection capacity of the device. I already told you It had microHDMI and it allowed to get a signal up to 4K. You can plug the Shield into a TV, leave it plugged in, connect a Bluetooth controller to the console, and play on your TV. Sound like Nintendo Switch to you? Later we will see that there are other parallels between Nintendo and Nvidia, but let’s continue.

Besides, there was GameStream. Basically, it’s the ancestor of GeForce Now and we could stream our local games to the Shield, as long as we had a GeForce GTX 650. That was really cool and Steam also tried it with Steam Link. Curiously, both technologies are now an application on our devices.

This possibility of playing titles in a “local” streaming was amazing at the time, but the problem that there were no native games for the system to justify the $300 boot. Shield was a Ferrari, but with spare wheels and could not exceed 80 kilometers per hour.

2014: Shield Tablet, the revival that brought a change of philosophy

You will have noticed that I did not use the term ‘Portable’ throughout the previous section. The reason is that, just a year after Shield, came Shield Tabletso to differentiate, the new one remained with ‘Tablet’ and the first generation with ‘Portable’.

After introductions, the Shield tablet it was a smarter product. For starters, Android still didn’t have a native gaming ecosystem to justify a new generation of Portable, so they released a tablet that could play more: if you wanted to play, you could, but otherwise, you had an extremely powerful .

The Tegra K1 was the heart, a SoC with four 2.2 GHz Cortex A15s (a brutal jump), 2 GB of RAM and a much more powerful GPU. The display is also category-upped to 1,920 x 1,200 pixels, the microHDMI has been retained and, if you wanted a remote control, you could buy it separately.

It was a machinón, but the first year units came out with a technical failure which caused overheating and combustion. Nvidia replaced the units and I would tell you it was a disaster like the Samsung Note 7s, but in reality either you were in the business or you didn’t even know it. And that’s it, the Shield Tablet was brutal, but it was “another tablet”.

In 2015, Nvidia updated the Shield Portable to make it compatible with Chromecast, so they continued to take care of their product, and GameStream was improving, but users were already caring – we were – about other things .

2017: Nintendo Switch, a typhoon from Japan with an Nvidia heart

Shortly after the Nvidia Shield tablet, Microsoft and Sony released Xbox One and PS4 respectively, the latter with the ability to stream from the console to the PS Vita. And if what you wanted was a portable, the Nintendo NX was already starting to ring.

The media gave a lot of embers with the Nintendo NX and, in the fall of 2016, the Japanese announced what it really was: the Nintendo Switch. I’m not going to spend a single line explaining what Switch is because at this point I consider it unnecessary.

Over 15 million consoles in first year, over 125 million since launch in March 2017 until now and, mind you, a Tegra SoC displacing everything. Nvidia no longer needed a laptop, it already “had” it, in many quotes, thanks to Nintendo. I don’t even want to imagine Nvidia’s profits just on Switch sales.

The deal between Nvidia and Nintendo was historic as it led to ‘The Big N’ launching certain Wii games on Nvidia Shield TV in Japan (Super Mario Galaxy, for example), but also Nvidia’s technology allowed certain games to to reach Switch through cloud computing.

come on it was a complete win-winas they say, but of course Nvidia ceased to have weight in the Android console segment just when games on the platform began to emerge.

2023: The state of the Android console industry

Shortly before the Switch launched there were rumors of an Nvidia Shield Portable 2, but it’s been six years and we still haven’t seen it, so you can already imagine how the story turned out. completed.

As I said at the beginning of the article, I firmly believe that if Shield had come out now it would have been a hit. Or maybe it wouldn’t have been a hit, but it sure would have had its audience.

Now we have games like ‘Genshin Impact’, ‘Towers of Fantasy’ or ‘Honkai: Star Rail’, a huge open world ‘Assassin’s Creed’ for mobiles is planned, as well as a not smaller ‘Final Fantasy VII’ for phones and streaming gameplay is better than ever.

The infrastructures are ready and, in fact, we have seen machines like the Logitech G Cloud which, amounting to very humble hardware, are based on cloud computing to allow us to play Xbox Series X or PC titles thanks to Steam Link and… yes, GeForce Now.

So, as you can see, we’re not here dealing with failure due to poor practices or poorly executed ideas. Merely, Nvidia released a console about five years earlier than what would have been ideal to get a piece of the pie.

In Xataka Mobile | The best free mobile games of 2023