Today Nvidia has made a trio of announcement regarding their Shield Tablet and all of it is good news for owners of these tablets. First, and we all knew this was coming anyways from previous teasing from Nvidia, Lollipop will be arriving for the Shield Tablet this month, more specifically November 18th, 2014. So basically in five days we should get the new Android OS.
This marks one of the first non-Nexus devices to receive the Lollipop version of Android. With it comes a lot of changes, especially to the Shield Hub which we posted about previously. Also coming is improved application performance and Google’s new Material design.
The second piece of news is the Valve Game Bundle. This is exclusive to the Shield Tablet and introduces Half-Life 2: Episode 1 to mobile gamers. This will be bundled in the Green Box Bundle which will have Half-Life 2: Episode 1 available for free alongside Half-Life 2 and Portal when you purchase the 32GB/LTE version of the Shield Tablet.
The last piece of news is regarding the Nvidia GRID. If you are not familiar with this, Nvidia’s GRID is the company’s cloud-based game streaming service. Think OnLive but better, much better. By connecting to NVIDIA GPU servers, the GRID service delivers a GeForce GTX gaming experience onto SHIELD devices. So far there are 20 AAA titles available with more being added on a regular basis. GRID will also be free until June 30, 2015 on both the Shield Portable and Shield Tablet. This also sounds like it isn’t location-locked to California anymore.
So some pretty great news coming from Nvidia today. Of course if you don’t own a Shield Tablet you end up missing out on Half-Life 2: Episode 1 which sucks but hopefully it isn’t exclusive to the Shield Tablet for too long of a time period. You can check out Nvidia’s Blog post for additional details.
Official Website: Nvidia Blog
