Nvidia Project Shield

In comes Nvidia with a rather surprising announcement at CES. They have bet the farm on the new Tegra 4 platform, which just happens to power their newly announced handheld gaming console. Like all new trendy devices as of late, the Project Shield is powered by none other than Android.

The design is centered around a full fledge gaming controller design with an attached screen, something you’d see right out of a college 3D project. The controller is equipped with two thumbstick analogs, a digital pad, face buttons and even shoulder buttons.

The display attached to the controller is a 5 inch 720p ripe for rich media consumption, and seeing as how this thing has access to Android’s Play Store, you can expect it to serve as a media player at heart as well. Speaking of Play Store, it can run Android apps in their entirety, so this could very well be a tablet replacement if you’re willing to deal with the form factor. Browsing the web, emailing and all other smartphone functions will be native to Project Shield.

Because of the Tegra 4 platform and that 72 Core GPU, this thing can do some really cool tricks, things like stream 4K video, stream your PC games right to the device and even access to Steam PC gaming catalog will be among the main selling points of this device. Still no word on price point, but I epect the price point to be the deciding factor for this device’s success.