NVIDIA might be better known for their GPUs and SoCs for mobile products, but the company has also made some tablets and other devices. As you might expect, ones which specialize in gaming. The SHIELD tablet was released in 2014 and last year the company released an improved version called the SHIELD Tablet K1. The company has actually been very good at supporting their devices and updating them to the most recent versions of the Android operating system and while last year’s tablet is already running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the company is now releasing this update for the older model.
The update for the NVIDIA SHIELD tablet is known as Software Upgrade 4.0 and besides updating the tablet to Android version 6.0 and including all of the improvements made by Google to the OS, NVIDIA also updated certain aspects of the apps that come pre-loaded on the tablet. The NVIDIA SHIELD camera app now features a new UI with Material Design elements, improved photo burst functionality and new real-time HD Image Effects have been added. Some of the UI Upgrades include the ability to personalize Home & Lock screens with different wallpapers and there are some new ones made by NVIDIA, the Quick Settings menu can also be customized by rearranging the toggles as well as adding or removing some of them, additionally, the voice commands of Google Now can now be activated from the lock screen. There’s also the new app permission system and Google Now on Tap.
A few aspects were optimized to be more power efficient, including some apps in standby and BT Low Energy scanning. Users can now monitor Memory Usage for each app, there are some improvements to WiFi Connectivity and it includes Android’s security patch from January. Finally, microSD cards can be integrated with the internal storage and the operating system will handle them. There are two ways to setup the microSD card, the Portable Storage option doesn’t delete any data from the SD card, but the Internal Storage option, which is used to integrate the SD card to the main storage wipes everything from the card. Either way, NVIDIA suggests backing up the content of the microSD card before downloading the update.