 The BitFenix Prodigy M is compact and ready for anything. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my full review of Nvidia's Shield handheld gaming device. Now it's not going to be a full review in the sense that I compare the battery life to other smartphones and tablets or give you empirical numbers on how the GPU performs. This is more of a hands-on review as well as a direct comparison to the Ghetto Shield which was an Xbox 360 controller bolted to a smartphone running Splashtop in order to simulate the Shield gaming experience where you can run PC games over wireless to your handheld device. Let's start with the overall usage experience. So first things first, it feels extremely solid in your hands. If anything, I'd say maybe a bit too solid. It can be quite heavy. If you're sitting with it in your lap or if you're laying on your stomach playing with it then you're not going to have any problems. But if you're laying on your back holding it above your head and trying to play with it that way then you might run into a little bit of difficulty with your arms getting fatigued after five or ten minutes and you might have to shift a little bit. With that said, it really doesn't feel like they added the extra weight for no apparent reason because it's got a nice beefy battery in it. You don't really feel like, oh the battery in this thing sucks. I'm playing with it and I'm running out of battery. No, what happens is you play with it, you plug it in and it'll be ready to go next time around. With that said, if you're not using the stock charger which is a 2.1 amp charger, you're going to be wasting your time. A 1 amp charger doesn't even charge this device fast enough to keep it charging while you're playing an Android game on it. So make sure you're using the default charger. It is a nice compact 2.1 amp charger. So that's definitely a plus. In terms of ergonomics, I found that with my hands, it seems like it's designed for someone with slightly bigger hands than me. I do have really small hands. I wear women's small motorcycle gloves. I was able to reach the A, B, X, Y buttons and the D pad without any difficulty, without shifting at all. The joysticks are a bit of a stretch for me but I can move them in all directions without too much of a challenge. I don't stand a chance of reaching any of these middle buttons without shifting. Especially at the back, the shoulder buttons as well as the triggers were fine as well. I didn't notice any heat that really bothered me so nothing really transferred through the game pad itself and the exhaust vent on the back moves the heat away from your hands. In fact, it's a little bit warm right now but really nothing unbearable. It's got mini HDMI as well as charging and a headphone-microphone combo jack if you're not already familiar with the way that Shield works. And as far as the design of the game pad itself goes, it's excellent. The buttons here have a great tactile response. The joysticks feel really good. The one exception is the D pad which is kind of poopy. It's fine for something like weapon switching or functionality that's not critical. Whereas if you were doing platforming on it, it's really not that special. The speakers are excellent though so it's loud enough that you can easily use it in an environment where there's a fair bit of ambient noise and the screen is nice and IPS has great viewing angles and looks outstanding. It's also got a great range of brightness and running a stock Android device was really refreshing for me because I run an HTC One which is using Sense and I've never actually used a stock Android device before. So there you go. That's my impressions overall of the Shield. I don't really see myself using the whole tag thing here but you can if you want. Also oh yes, this is an accessory that I sort of recommend picking up. This is their carry case which has a nice hard shell to it so it's going to protect it if you're traveling around with it. It's got a little plug at the back that allows you to charge the device even when it's inside. Comes with a little wrist strap and the overall feel is very rugged. There's little carrying pouches up here in the top. The one reason why I wouldn't recommend picking it up because otherwise I really really would. It's quite nice. Is that I didn't find myself traveling with Shield much. By the time you've got the case and the Shield it's quite bulky and quite heavy so I found myself using it at home more than out and about. When I was out and about though it was kind of cool because you get some you get kind of a couple double takes. It's like oh what is he playing on? I personally do believe that devices like this are the future of mobile gaming with an open platform versus you know oh well when we decide to release a new console there will be a whole new slew of games. We will re-release everything or we won't re-release everything and you will like it. I mean having something that behaves more like a PC where we can get hardware upgrades as they come. We can play the entire back library of games and expect new games to come. This is the future. But right now the game library is relatively small. However that brings us to the game streaming experience. Nvidia's whole claim to fame with this device other than the fact that you can run any Android game pretty much. I was running GTA Vice City on it which has a lot of warnings when you install it. Oh don't run anything else at the same time. Turn the graphic details down if it's not running correctly. It ran like a dream on this thing. No difficulty whatsoever. It's my first time playing it too so I spent a fair bit of time on that. But anyway the game streaming is how they are planning to augment the slightly smaller subset of Android games that do have full controller support and will work just fine. And in my experience man is it awesome. Now we did do the whole ghetto shield thing where we were using splash top and we did show that it can be done. But I think what you guys are going to see with some of the slow motion footage I'm going to be showing you is that Nvidia shield really does deliver a nearly latency free experience. So we took this slow motion footage at 480 frames per second which means if you really felt like it you could slow down the footage and you could find out exactly how many milliseconds of extra delay the wireless connection is adding. But what's really going to stand out more than anything else is how close it is to the gaming grade 120 hertz monitor behind it. And now we're going to shift over to our ghetto shield with splash top that not only is not running as high a resolution so it's 640 by 480 instead of 1280 by 720 although it still looks great on a 4.7 inch screen. Like let's be really clear about that. It still looks fine. So it's lower resolution you obviously get less battery life because you're using your phone you obviously have to like bolt it to something in order to have it be a great experience and there's all these things but the latency is not even close. We found we could play games with the ghetto shield but it's easy to play games with the proper shield. Not only that but the experience of getting shield running is much more seamless. With the ghetto shield you have to manually configure your desktop resolution. It'll only work with games that are able to run in full screen windowed mode and there's a bunch of caveats like that. With the shield you press the big Nvidia button in the middle which brings up your Tegra optimized games your shield store and ah ha your PC games. It launches Steam. It changes the resolution for you gives you a bunch of clues as to what gestures you can use and then boom it gives you a games list. So we use Borderlands 2 and Crysis to validate that things were working correctly. Crysis was the one that being an older title it streamed great it looked great but you can really tell the HUD elements aren't optimized for it. There's a lot of key bindings that are designed for mouse and keyboard so there wasn't really a corresponding button that made any sense. It's not yeah so it wasn't perfect but it looked great and it was very playable. Not having auto aim when you're relying on using a controller is definitely a disadvantage. But Borderlands 2 was a fantastic experience and this I think really makes my point about how well how the experience differs from something where you're manually setting things up every time you can be anywhere in your house and running this and not really thinking about what's going on in your PC and as someone happens to be on it it should be noted that your PC does display video while you're gaming on the shield but it doesn't play audio so it only pushes audio to the shield instead of just your speakers being blaring anytime you're anywhere else in your house gaming on the device. Now wireless you can't just use any old run-of-the-mill $29.99 Best Buy special wireless router. It's not going to work. You want to get a decent wireless router you can check out the list of recommended ones on Nvidia.com. We found that there were routers that worked just fine even from a floor away such as the EA 4500 that was not on the list but you need a strong concurrent dual band router so that is 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz at the same time because the wireless solution on the Nvidia shield is excellent and that's part of what makes the technology work so well. So I think that pretty much wraps it up for everything I wanted to say about it. Is it a recommended buy at $2.99? Hard to say because much like any other console it depends on the game library so if you look at that Android library and you go yeah sure that's worth it to me I'm game then great that's that's perfect for you. If you look at that library and you go that's not good enough but oh I have a PC library that I can use to augment it I think I'll use this a lot around my house then then that might be good enough for you too. If you don't have an Android device at all I actually found I'd used it a lot just for watching videos on Netflix or even replying to emails when I'm just out and about and it happened to be the closest thing to me I mean the touch screen is excellent. There are some there are a few sort of UI things that are weird like apps that are expecting to be running on a phone when they're running on a low resolution device and are optimized for portrait and don't really switch to landscape very well some of those were kind of funny and like using it like this but overall it was it was a good usage experience other than other than that UI weirdness. Would I recommend it for 300 you know what it's your call but I understand why it costs 300. It has the latest Tegra 4 processor which is extremely fast it really does feel like a very buttery smooth Android experience everything you're doing whether it's graphics or the CPU itself and you look at how much something like a phone costs this is everything a phone is and more in some ways except it doesn't happen to have a wireless connection for mobile data that's the only real difference here and you know like no camera on the back and stuff like that but there's a lot of engineering that went into building this thing and it's expensive to make I think 300 is reasonable in terms of the hardware and I think I've rambled quite enough leave a like if you like this video leave a dislike if you disliked it and leave a comment let me know do you think the future of mobile gaming is portable devices like this that run on an open platform even if maybe Nvidia shield isn't the one maybe it's something that's a little bit more pocketable I don't know you tell me.