Nvidia has just unveiled the successor to its last year’s Shield tablet, dubbed the Shield Tablet K1. For all intents and purposes, the K1 is exactly like the original Shield tablet, but it comes with a few design tweaks and a lower price tag that helps it set it apart from its predecessor.
The chassis of the Shield K1 tablet is the same as its predecessor, with Nvidia replacing the glossy ‘SHIELD’ logo at the back to ones written from metal. Additionally, the front facing stereo speakers of the tablet are now covered with a rubberised material that help aid in gripping them easily.
Under the hood, the Shield Tablet K1 is powered by a quad-core Tegra K1 chip clocked at up to 2.2GHz and a 192-core Kepler GPU. The display size and its resolution also remain the same: 8-inch at 1920 x 1200. Other specs of the tablet, which includes 16GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot, a 5MP rear shooter, Wi-fi n MIMO, and a 5MP front camera, also remain unchanged from the original Shield tablet.
On the software side, the new Shield tablet runs on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with the Marshmallow update coming sometime soon.
The original Shield tablet already offered great bang for its $299 price tag, but the new Shield tablet takes things to a whole new level. By removing the ShieldDirect Stylus 2, a USB cable and charger, Nvidia has been able to reduce the price tag of the new Shield tablet to only $199. To further sweeten the deal, Nvidia is bundling 3 months of free trial of its Geforce Now cloud gaming service with the tablet.
The Shield Tablet K1 is already available for purchase in the United States, Europe and Canada from today.
