Extreme Test - NVIDIA Shield Portals Two 9-year Old Boys Through 20-hour Road Trip

The Tegra 4 NVIDIA Shield is a powerful, portable handheld gaming console that can play demanding first-person video games like Valve’s Portal with long battery life. A recent extreme, real-world test with two active nine-year old boys on a cumulative twenty-hour round-trip-road trip demonstrated in-car happiness by all occupants. The combination of an Xbox like controller (similar to a DualShock controller), 1280×720 pixel touchscreen, Android OS, plus the Valve Port of Portal to NVIDIA Shield redefined the long road trip experience with young children. Instead of contention in the back seat, comments from the 9-year old male judges resembled tactical directions as life-threatening monsters were defeated rather than “Are we there yet” and “I am bored!”. Neglected contenders for attention included a touchscreen tablet, Nintendo 3DS, DVD player (with over thirty DVDs). Demonstrating ruggedness and excellent video quality for games and movies, the reviewers look forward with great anticipation to the NVIDIA K1 powered Shield 2 and additional high-performance games. Included in this wish list is in-car ad-hoc network capable games for multi-player backseat capability. (Note: the Shield 2 product announcement has been leaked and will happen on July 22, 2014.)

Also worth noting is that the fallback 1960s era attention holding device -a giant jaw-breaker – came in second place to the NVIDIA Shield. The standard business card is included for size reference. Those giant jaw-breakers live up to their name!

Consumption of giant jawbreaker over 20-hour road trip

The free NVIDIA Shield given out at the GTC 2014 conference in combination with an already owned NVIDIA Shield made road trip planning and concerns about the experience with two active and vocal nine-year old boys a snap. Just load some games like Portal plus a few mp4 movies and you are set to go. Also important was a 15,600 mAh Limeaid USB battery charger that was used to alternatively add power to each device during the trip.

Nine year-old reviewer Andrew Robbins of Gig Harbor summarized using the NVIDIA Shield over the twenty hours, “it was awesome!”