The Shield from NVIDIA is a gaming console that can run most games developed for Android on it. It has a display of 5 inch but the only issue is that android games being touchscreen centric is a bit difficult to play using the game controller. The Shield otherwise is priced quite competitively at $300.

Realising the gamer’s difficulty, NVIDIA is coming out with an update that would enable users to map the game controllers like the fingers and therefore the need to swipe the screen would not be there. The update would also enable connecting the Shield to a TV screen and playing the game thereon. The Shield is connected to the TV with an HDMI cable and then a Bluetooth controller can be linked. Need for holding the Shield controller in hand would not be there after that.

This mode of operation termed Console Mode would also work with NVIDIA GameStream. Games on the PC which has an NVIDIA graphics card could be connected this way to the TV and be played on the TV screen. The game console supports about 50 games as of now. The advantage is quite clear, that users can play both Android and PC games on their handheld console or the TV screen using this device and the software update from NVIDIA.

The update gets Android 4.3 to the game console. There is also the possibility of the APK or OBB files to be shifted to the external memory card attached via SD Card post the update. Users though won’t have a whiff of any of these changes so far as their using the device is concerned, as they get to play their games without any issues. This frees up internal memory of the handheld as well.

So far as hardware specifications of the NVIDIA shield goes, it is powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 4 ARM Cortex-A15 quad core processor. It has 2 GB of internal RAM and the display unit is 5 inch by dimension, having a resolution of 1280 x 720pixels. It also has stereo speakers for adding flavor to the games and WiFi, Bluetooth for connectivity. It also is GPS enabled.