Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 review

When it arrived last year, the original Shield was a seriously powerful gaming tablet that packed in a lot of extra value if you happened to own an Nvidia graphics card. Unfortunately, a battery overheating issue forced the company to recall a large number of tablets, and eventually withdraw it from sale completely. The Shield Tablet is now back as the K1, a facelifted version with a battery that won't blow up unexpectedly.

What’s changed?

Battery aside, the differences between the K1 and the original Shield Tablet are mostly skin deep. You’d be hard pushed to spot the difference between the two; the K1 has a silver Shield logo on the rear rather than a shiny black one, the edges of the tablet are matte, rather than shiny, and the speaker grilles have a rubberised finish, rather than the plastic seen on the original. The ports, buttons and speakers are all in the same places too.

You don’t get a stylus with the K1, but while gamers are unlikely to miss it, anyone wanting to sketch or take notes can buy Nvidia’s DirectStylus separately for £15. There’s no docking mechanism to store it inside the tablet, however. There’s also no power adaptor in the box, which helps keep costs down. You’re almost guaranteed to have a micro USB cable lying around the house, but unless you have a 2A charger it could take a while to refuel the tablet once it runs out of juice. If you insist on having an Nvidia-branded cable and charger, you can pick up the pair for £18.

There have been a few cost-cutting changes inside, too, simplifying the range by ditching the 4G LTE modem and the 32GB storage option. The K1 is only available in a 16GB, Wi-Fi only configuration. There’s still a microSD card slot for adding extra capacity, and when Android Marshmallow arrives it will be far better at handling external storage than Lollipop is at present.

Performance

Otherwise, the K1 is almost identical to the original Shield tablet. It has the same Nvidia Tegra K1 quad-core processor running at 2.2GHz, 2GB of RAM and the incredibly fast Kepler SMX GPU, which made the original such a potent gaming machine. The Shield's chip is slightly different to the one found in Google’s Nexus 9, which is dual-core and 64-bit, but in practice there’s little performance difference between the two tablets.

A Peacekeeper browser benchmark score of 1,148 is on par with Samsung’s £400 Galaxy Tab S2, which helps make web browsing feel very fluid and responsive. GeekBench 3 single- and multi-core scores of 1,142 and 3,554 are also among the fastest we’ve seen from an 8in Android tablet, which helps Android 5.1 Lollipop animate, open apps and multi-task smoothly.

With near-identical hardware, it was no surprise that the K1 turned in almost the exact same battery life score as the original Shield Tablet. At 12 hours 39 minutes, it’s among the better 8in tablets, but still falls slightly behind Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S2 and Lenovo Yoga Tab 3, which both managed over 14 hours. Even so, you’ll get a full day of use from the K1, and should manage over five hours when playing graphically intensive games.

Gaming

The Kepler GPU is one of the most powerful tablet graphics chips around, so it should come as no surprise that it excelled in the GFXBench GL Manhattan tests. Scores of 1801 (or 29fps) in the onscreen test and 1961 (or 32fps) in the offscreen test are second only to the iPad Air 2. There’s simply no other Android devices that are as fast. It shows in games like Blizzard’s Hearthstone, with battle animations looking incredibly smooth.

As a Shield device, the K1 includes access to Nvidia’s GeForce Now and GameStream services. The former provides unlimited access to 50 PC games, streamed from the cloud to your tablet, for £7.49 a month. The selection is mostly limited to older titles, with newer games like the Witcher 3 available separately at a premium, although they justify the extra cost by including a Good Old Games or Steam key for offline play.

GameStream is the free alternative that uses a PC equipped with an Nvidia graphics card to stream your games library locally over a wireless network. It works brilliantly if you have powerful enough hardware; Nvidia suggests a GeForce GTX 650 or higher desktop graphics card or a GeForce GTX 800M laptop GPU as the minimum for uninterrupted play. A dual-band 802.11n router is also recommended for 1080p streaming. It’s frustrating that Nvidia hasn’t added 802.11ac, but this was missing from the original tablet so it’s not a surprise to find it absent here too.

A controller, like the optional Shield Tablet Wireless Controller (£50, www.ebuyer.com), is essential for serious gaming. It connects via Wi-Fi direct rather than Bluetooth for lower latency, and for up to four-controller multiplayer gaming on a single tablet. The Xbox-style layout makes it ideal for console ports, but the built-in touchpad and volume control buttons are handy for mobile-focused titles too. A headset jack and integrated microphone let you use Android’s voice-operated features too.

Display and sound

It appears Nvidia has used the same display panel in the K1 as it did for the original Shield Tablet; both have a 1,920x1,200 resolution and relatively high pixel density of 283ppi. An sRGB colour gamut coverage of 79.2% was above average when the Shield first launched, but in a £150 tablet it’s a very respectable score indeed. Black levels remain rather high at 0.4cd/m2, and a contrast ratio of 823:1 wasn’t particularly high, but an above average maximum brightness of 434cd/m2 gives photos and videos plenty of punch.

Importantly, viewing angles are excellent, and while not earth-shattering, the panel is easily one of the best you’ll get in a £150 Android tablet.

The side-firing stereo speakers are still some of the best we’ve heard from a tablet, producing a clear mid-range and relatively crisp trebles. There’s even some semblance of bass presence, and stereo separation was noticeable in films and TV. You won’t need to reach for a pair of headphones for YouTube or Twitch videos, either, as the speakers are impressively loud.

Camera

The 5-megapixel cameras on the front and back produce fairly respectable images outdoors where there’s lots of light. Saturation is reasonable, but they were a little soft. The HDR mode left images looking a little washed-out, and there was still a lack of sharpness. The front-facing camera works surprisingly well indoors and in low light, as would be the most likely situation when streaming game commentary using the Shield’s Twitch integration.

Conclusion

We loved the Nvidia Shield when it first arrived, and the price cut only makes us love it more. For £150 there’s very little else out there that’s as powerful or as flexible when it comes to gaming. Losing the stylus and power adaptor to significantly lower the price doesn’t make it any less of a bargain, as we didn’t find the stylus very useful and have plenty of USB cables lying around. The design, while tweaked, can’t compete with the Asus ZenPad S, and many will prefer Google’s Nexus 9 for its 4:3 aspect ratio display, but you’ll have to spend significantly more to get anything better. It retains its Best Buy award.