This is definitely the year of unconventional products, we have smartwatches, we have Google Glass, we have the Samsung Galaxy S IV Zoom, we have the Chromecast and we have the Nvidia Shield. Apparently, people care about this new markets since all of them, with the exception of the Zoom, are selling like hotcakes. Smartwatches are being funded on Kickstarter every day and selling out in stores, the same thing happened with the Chromecast, merely hours after Google announced it was sold out everywhere, in the Play Store, in Amazon and in Best Buy and Glass, well… you just can’t buy glass, but the units at I/O sold out really fast, and the participation in Google’s #ifIhadglass contest was massive. Either people are getting bored with their phones and tablets or this new devices are really interesting.
What we didn’t know so far was how well the Nvidia Shield was selling but now, as CNET is reporting, we get an idea thanks to Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, that said that the gaming device was flying of the selves. Of course that doesn’t mean too much, while we don’t know the exact numbers, Huang said that only a couple thousand units were made but added that the company is ramping up production to deliver more units to the stores and into people’s hands.
Jen-Hsun Huang said:
“It’s still early, but we expect to do quite well with Shield,”
The Nvidia Shield received pretty good reviews around the web, both from Android websites and gaming websites and the biggest complaint was about the games offered in the Play Store or more precisely, the lack of games that are prepared for this type of device, both in gameplay and in graphics quality. This is Nvidia’s first consumer product and it’s also the first device to launch with the company’s newest processor, the Tegra 4, which is Nvidia’s latest attempt at taking some market share away from Qualcomm, the undisputed king of mobile processors in mainstream devices.
Besides the Tegra 4, the Shield packs a 5 inch 1280 x 720 display, two analog thumbsticks a D-pad and a pair of very good speakers. You can get games from 3 different sources, one being the Google Play Store, the other being Nvidia’s Tegra Zone, which features games optimized for Tegra chipsets and also those specifically optimized for Shield and finally you can stream games from Steam directly from your PC to your Shield as long as you’re in the same WiFi connection, although only a handful of Nvidia cards are compatible with this.
The Nvidia Shield is available for $300 and started shipping just 10 days ago so there’s still a lot of time to figure out if it’s a hit or a miss for the chipset company.