

The Nvidia Shield Tablet Review - crazysaem
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8296/the-nvidia-shield-tablet-review

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ajmurmann
I was waiting for over half a year for the next shield and am very
disappointed it's a tablet. I liked the original shield because it allows to
stream PC games throughout my house, so that I can play them on my couch or in
bed. The other awesome thing is playing emulators on the go. With the tablet I
can't do any of those properly, because the controller is not built in and I
need to have a place to set up the tablet. So I can't play it on the train or
anywhere in my house excepts my desk or my dining room table. If you already
have a tablet (or 2 in my case) and wanted this as a gaming device, then
that's a bummer. It's too bad. Everything that targets hardcore gamers fails.

~~~
staz
same feeling here, I don't understand the switch, the interesting thing about
the Shield was the form factor. Now it only provide a moderate aventage over
existing tablet + Xbox controller

~~~
cwyers
It's not a switch. The point of the Shield line is to create a market for
Tegra chips. Adding a second form factor is an attempt to broaden their
potential customer base, and more directly compete with traditional tablets.
The original Shield is still for sale. (I love mine, and I am certainly open
to buying another revision of the original shield with a K1 at some point, but
this isn't in place of that.)

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shmerl
An example of regular glibc Linux running on Nvidia Jetson TK1 board (same
chipset as in Shield) on fully open stack (nouveau + Wayland):

[http://www.codethink.co.uk/2014/06/12/no-secret-sauce-
just-o...](http://www.codethink.co.uk/2014/06/12/no-secret-sauce-just-open-
source)

I wonder if there are open drivers for other components in Shield (WiFi,
accelerometer, etc.) to enable running fully open stack on it. I'd really like
to have something like Nemo or Plasma Active running on top of Wayland there.

~~~
jwise0
(I work for NVIDIA, but not on the Shield team, and am speaking only in a
personal capacity, not a corporate capacity.)

There has been a source release to build Android, at least [0] -- the open
source teams, I've found, are very very careful about pushing source the same
day they push binaries of updates. I think that WiFi and accelerometer bits
are in the kernel, and since they're in the kernel, the source is available
[1]. It looks like the binary blobs are for camera, GPS, GPU, and Icera
(3G/LTE radio); if you're using Nouveau, then although GPU usage may not be
the most power-efficient, you should have most of what you need to run the
system.

[0] [http://nv-
tegra.nvidia.com/gitweb/?p=manifest/android/binary...](http://nv-
tegra.nvidia.com/gitweb/?p=manifest/android/binary.git;a=blob_plain;f=README;hb=rel-
st8-r2.2-partner)

[1] [http://nv-
tegra.nvidia.com/gitweb/?p=linux-3.10.git;a=shortl...](http://nv-
tegra.nvidia.com/gitweb/?p=linux-3.10.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/rel-
st8-r2.2)

~~~
shmerl
Thanks, that sounds promising! 3G/LTE is rarely open, and I'd go for the WiFi
model anyway if anything. Touchscreen driver is also critical for a tablet
though.

Do you know if Linux for Tegra R19 ([https://developer.nvidia.com/linux-tegra-
rel-19](https://developer.nvidia.com/linux-tegra-rel-19)) is using those
kernel drivers for WiFi/accelerometer, or that's a bare minimum release?

Also, if this isn't of course under some NDA and etc, do you know if Nvidia
plan to merge development of the closed Tegra driver with nouveau for K1?
Since Nvidia contributed some code already, may be they consider switching to
the same approach like Intel?

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Deusdies
I'm somewhat disturbed by the fact that Samsung (and Apple) seems to be the
only one that is pushing for >= 10" tablets. I had a Galaxy Tab S Pro which is
not that great (heard the Note line is very good). I ended up gifting it to my
dad and I bought myself an iPad, even though I'm heavily invested in Android.

Nexus 10 has no successor, and LG is not coming out with anything with that
diagonal, and now this.

~~~
dm2
I have a 21 inch "tablet" hanging on my office wall, it's pretty useful as a
dashboard and I can put it on a standing desk for typing up emails and
watching videos, [http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/aio-
products/slate21-pro.html](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/aio-
products/slate21-pro.html)

~~~
ajmurmann
would be nice if it wasn't power cord bound.

~~~
dm2
Not really, it's heavy, like ~14 pounds.

It's definitely useful though, a good niche product between desktop computer
and tablet.

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anon4
If only it had 4-8GB RAM. I could actually see myself do stuff on it other
than play games. It comes with a stylus and SD card slot! That's almost my
whole checklist for a dream tablet:

1\. stylus with good support

2\. SD card slot

3\. powerful hardware

4\. lots of RAM

I can't understand why they put so little in.

~~~
dm2
They might have tested it and found that it just wasn't an advantage to having
more RAM.

The RAM they have in there is pretty fast and the SSD to RAM might be fast
enough and Android's RAM management good enough that more than 2GB just isn't
necessary (but I haven't seen those tests, just guessing).

There could also be a battery life reason.

It looks like the test/dev/beta version of the Shield did have 4GB of RAM, so
I'm guessing there was a decent reason they reduced it.

[http://www.droid-life.com/2014/04/23/nvidia-shield-2-gets-
be...](http://www.droid-life.com/2014/04/23/nvidia-shield-2-gets-benchmarked-
tegra-k1-soc-and-4gb-of-ram/)

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mschuster91
Interesting why they didn't license Wacom tech like Samsung did for the Note
family.

