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Project Shield is now NVIDIA Shield and it's up for pre-order on May 20th for $350

by: John -
More On: Project Shield
Finally, NVIDIA's Shield is an official product and today they've announced the pricing information and pre-order option. For $350, you can own this 5" IPS Tegra 4 hand held that can play Android games and stream Steam games when it comes out in June. Pre-ordering starts May 20th.

Seeing it at CES, I was really impressed by it and was hoping the pricing wouldn't be too bad. At $350, it's at the upper echelon of what I would pay for, but the package is pretty cool. 

Shield will be coming out with Android 4.2.1 and NVIDIA promises monthly updates. We'll see how that goes, but I would love it if they kept up with any OS improvements that Google releases. Apps that don't support landscape will be an issue. When I talked with NVIDIA at CES, I was told this would be unlocked out of the box so if that's the case, I can't wait to see what some hackers can do with it.

I know a lot of folks are going to be interested to see how Shield does. It's a brand new type of product for NVIDIA and it's going to compete with plenty of smartphone options out there. It'll be the first product, if I am not mistaken, to use Tegra 4 and I think it'll be a good example of how powerful the mobile chip can be from Team Green.