To give you a very (VERY) condensed background. When NVIDIA launched the Tegra SoC it was a pretty big deal as they were one of the first companies to bring heavy graphics knowledge into that particular vertical. One of the first big products to hit the marker with Tegra under the hood was the ZuneHD. However, Microsoft did not exactly market or push this product out the way they should have. Because of this the ZuneHD (one of the best audio players I have ever owned) was doomed to failure.

After that NVIDIA had a few more design wins, but partner issues and a lack of some important feature options hurt their reputation in the market. NVIDIA went back to the drawing board and came up with a new Tegra design that included some of the missing features (like LTE) and also improved both performance and energy efficiency. Now to fix their reputation and also to make sure things were built the right way, NVIDIA decided to start building their own mobile products.

Having taken a few lessons from their time with Microsoft, NVIDIA dove in a built the Shield mobile gaming platform. It was a solid idea and most people that own one will tell you that it is a great device. However, it did not speak to everyone. NVIDIA needed to build a more common form factor. This is the basic tablet. So they came out with the Shield Tablet, an 8-Inch product that features a Tegra K1 SoC (Kepler based) with 192 GPU cores for good measure.

The Shield Tablet will be a nice addition to the shield line up as you are getting great list of options including PC Streaming, GIRD Cloud Streaming, Twitch and NVIDIA ShadowPlay, and a Console Mode. To make things even more attractive NVIDIA is also pushing out a wireless controller for this device that includes voice control. It should be interesting to see what the market does with this.

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