Gadgetory

a qualifying intel product and get entered in the Intel dynamic ticket giveaway for a chance to win great prizes is it Intel gaming promo com to learn more to give you guys some idea how excited I am to be having a look at the Nvidia shield number one is I built myself a ghetto shield which you can check out and number two is this that is how excited I am about Nvidia shield I know Nvidia is getting a lot of flack about this product from the enthusiasts saying if I wanted to play those games I play them on my PC or saying if I wanted to play those other games I'd play them on my smart phone or saying it's too expensive or saying whatever whatever and whatever else personally I am extremely excited about it for a number of reasons number one is this is the first consumer grade device that features a Tegra 4 processor so Tegra 4 might not necessarily be all about the CPU aspect of the performance but it is all about GPU and early benchmarks of shields seem to be indicating that compared particularly to the GPUs you can get in most modern smartphones these days even things like the Samsung Galaxy s4 it is very very powerful so it's a capable little gaming platform and number two is the fact that it enables not only the ability to play Android devices ARP 2 and Android devices to play Android games on a dedicated device but also your PC games and last but not least with what I'd consider to be a console grade controller now I've had my hands on shield before back when we did an episode of net linked weekly so I already know what the fit and finish is like and guys it is absolutely fantastic so included with the box you get the shield device itself you get the wall wart which has nvidia z' felt Nvidia logo on it so there's not really much to say there and then you also get a microUSB charging cable I still hate microUSB I understand why they're using it but that won't make me stop hating it you also get a Quick Start Guide that acts as a product tour although NVIDIA has some great videos on their YouTube channel that can walk you through the whole process of setting it up it comes with on back here a mini HDMI out so you can run it directly to your TV if you wanted to do that for whatever reason although personally I'd expect most people to use it handheld it has micro USB right there for charging a headphone microphone jack this is the one ergonomic thing that I think is a little bit strange about shield I wouldn't have minded seeing this perhaps on the bottom of the device so it's a little bit closer to you and it's not coming out the back of it and then finally on the back you have a microSD slot so shield only has 16 gigs of memory but you can add up to 64 gigs with it as micro SDXC in fact we have one that's a very high performance and disc one that runs at about 80 megabytes per second so on super stoked on using that now the exhaust vent I've seen it in action like I said before doesn't interfere with where your fingers sit which is nice because there is a fair bit of power in there so it does need active cooling so that's the only exhaust vent right there but it exhausts away from your finger so you've got the two shoulder buttons right here left and right as well as to trigger buttons so those are nice analog buttons with varying sensitivity levels just like that also on the back here you've got what they're calling I think they call them tags or something like that whatever whatever branding they have for them you can basically swap out these top I think they were calling them shields at the beginning and that was part of where the name came from but at any rate you can get carbon-fiber ones or whatever it's not the kind of thing that I would be likely to replace but if I did want to customise my shield and I knew someone who happens to be sort of crafty then I would probably just get them to like paint this or something that would be kind of a neat way to customize your shield without actually spending more money on it the bottom of the device has a very nice rubberized grip hopefully that's not going to come off over time it doesn't really feel like it's like it's got any come off this to it so feels very very good the one thing about the feeling of shield that sort of put me off a little bit at first particularly I'm going to have to let you guys know once I spend more time with it this is a device that I'll be taking home and I will be using and I will be doing a more extensive follow-up on letting you guys know exactly what I think of Nvidia shield but the one thing that puts me off a little bit about it is the weight it's quite heavy compared to like a smartphone or other Android device compared to what you might be used to however with that weight comes solidity so you can see when I shake it around that hinge doesn't move the hinge is strong a crappy hinge can take what otherwise might be a beautiful ID or a really nice device and turn it into something that is annoying and then finally useless when the thing actually breaks so I'm glad to see that they've invested in making the hinge correct I also know speaking of investing in making things correctly that they've gone through a ton of revisions on this game pad since CES which was the first time I was hands-on with shield so it's got an eight-way d-pad up here on the left it's got two analog joysticks right here that field there actually that's quite nice I've got a bit quite a linear feel to them okay yeah excited about that Android navigation buttons here so home back the custom Nvidia button which loads up the Nvidia interface that takes you to like Tiger Zone and you can play android games from there or you can buy android games or you can fire up the PC streaming so PC streaming requires a few different things number one is you need a shield number two is you need the latest drivers and GeForce experience for your desktop number three is you need to kepler GPU so that's Nvidia 600 series 650 Ti and up I believe don't maybe don't quote me on that on but honestly I'd recommend anything from sort of a six sixty and up if you want to have a great experience whether it's on the desktop or below 650 TI boost actually isn't that easy though okay anyway you need a game that you need the latest beta version of Steam so you have to enable beta builds and Steam and then you should pretty much be ready to go you just have to make sure you've launched the game at least once and then you have to have the shield running on the same Wi-Fi network as the network that your PC is attached to contrary to Nvidia setup video where they show both the PC and shield connected via Wi-Fi you don't have to have them both on Wi-Fi they just have to be connected through the same router so you press the Nvidia button in the middle to fire it up you can see they have a helpful instruction thing here on the cover the one thing that bothers me and other people that I've seen already a little bit about shield is that the 5 inch 720p display multi-touch bubbled on giving you as suspects in the unboxing like I usually do has a very large frame around it I kind of wish that they'd gone with something more like maybe a five and a half inch and they'd reduced the the bezel space a little bit because having a big bezel around a monitor really does make it look smaller than it is 720p and 5-inch isn't that small compared to what we're used to on our phones in fact it's quite large but I think what happens is you're used to here's what happens here's why it feels small so besides the larger bezel people hold their phones like this so there's no interface here so you hold your phone you like this you sit this far away from it with a shield you're going to hold it in a similar position but look how much farther the screen is from your face so that's why the five-inch screen ends up feeling a little bit on the smaller side it's also because of the bulkiness of the device itself this contrasts sharply with something like the SteelSeries free which is their little Bluetooth controller that you compare to your phone and didn't end up being a very successful product but with the shield and videos gone we'll know we're not going to make it small we're going to make it ergonomic and everything else sort of well so much so much for that there's a couple tuned speakers here actually I never did finish the the guided tour there's a microphone port right there and then ABXY buttons so you can actually use not only the touchscreen up here for interfacing with the shield but also the button so I'm going to walk you through that in a moment once I go through the startup process so as you guys can see the screen is quite glossy so if you prefer matte screens this is not one but we've we've come to expect that from touchscreens there's also a quick getting started guide so it shows you the Nvidia button as well as walking you through the navigation buttons and well okay so the ABXY buttons showing you the functionality that they mostly have so a is usually confirmed B is usually back and then finally AHA yes you can actually use the right joystick check that out as a virtual mouse pointer for precision movements and this is the kind of thing I may end up actually using a fair bit so that's that's that's actually pretty cool and then you can actually click just by pressing that down I don't know if it's going to allow me to click on continue here look look it's kind of awkward too yeah there we go that network not bad or press y2p there so I'm just going to set up my right here so if you've ever set up an Android device before you'll have probably seen all the stuff that I just did because this is a completely stock Android device in fact one of the things that Nvidia is committed to on their webpage for shield is timely upgrades to the latest Android operating systems so they've only really made a couple small changes to it and that is well pretty much this so pressing the Nvidia button gives you shield games that you have installed the shield store PC games so you can navigate in all the ways that you're used to so you can go touchscreen okay you can use the d-pad just like that you can use the left analog stick okay especially if you're not clumsy about it and finally you can use the shoulder buttons to navigate through the different menus so you have almost so many options that my mother would find it confusing but it's okay I'm not my mother so I think I can handle that it comes preloaded with a couple of shield games so we're going to go ahead and go up shield game so we have real boxing Riptide gp2 beach buggy blitz sonic for episode 2 and so these are this particularly as a Tegra HD game you can tell from the little logo in the top and if you want to shop for more than you can check out the shield store there so they have everything from free games to paid games and you can of course use the regular Google Play Store as well it also comes pre-loaded with a couple of other applications including twitch TV if you're a gamer who's got something like a shield there's a good chance you watch game streams on Twitch or maybe the line of tech tips when show on Twitch that's another option as well and I just want to cover a couple of other hardware specs before I give you guys sort of the follow-up so actually no I'll tell you what we're going to follow up at first we're going to be doing ghetto shield versus our actual shield in terms of latency comparison so guys stay tuned for that that's going to be really exciting remember that shield has a very excellent wireless implementation so it's Wireless end but it's MIMO so that is pretty much an effective doubling of the available bandwidth and also because it uses the 5 gigahertz band it is able to potentially reduce interference with random household devices so there's that there's also the fact that it uses the built-in h.264 encoding on Kepler in order to reduce the file sizes of the images that are being beamed to it when you're using the beta right now it's beta game streaming from your top so we want to compare latency as well as image quality to our ghetto shield that we built using an HTC One and an Xbox 360 controller it does have GPS built in it has two gigs of RAM and I think that's pretty much it for the stuff that I had forgotten so far and then the second follow up will be more of a long-term review I don't do many reviews but this is something that I'm going to spend probably a good month with and give you guys some idea once I have it how much do I actually use the bloody thing because I have an Android phone I have a PC so what am I going to use this for I don't know maybe that'll give you guys some idea if it's something that you'll use as well but I find the form factor very comfortable shield has outstanding battery life better than pretty much any phone so it's great for watching things like movies in theory which I haven't done yet it's also more ergonomic to hold than something like a tablet necessarily when you're carrying it around with you you know down like that there's your movie whereas tablets you have to carry them around with what are often very awkward so you like look at this this is sort of what I'd consider to be like a typical tablet case this is an Iconia w7 and you kind of like prop it up on this thing but I never quite trust them whereas something like a shield makes a lot of sense to me but of course it has a smaller screen than most tablets at any rate guys that's it for the shield unboxing don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos click like on the video if you liked it click dislike if you disliked it and definitely leave a comment if there's anything that you want me to particularly talk about when I'm giving my longer-term impressions of Nvidia shield in an upcoming video