The Shield K1 tab was quite a masterpiece of its time. An excellent 8 inch display with a 1900X1200 resolution IPS panel with dual front facing speakers, an okayish front and rear cam combo (both 5 MP with HDR), a mini HDMI out(upto 4K output), an OTG compatible micro USB port, a micro SD card slot and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
The exterior is nothing to complain about. The speaker grills are covered with rubber and the back is plastic with a rubber finish too, for a great grip. All this external interface is built around an NVidia Tegra K1 processor with 192 kepler cores for graphics with an ARM Cortex 2.2 GHz CPU, attached to a 2 GB memory. Storage is 16 GB which was not bad for a 2015 device. The 128 GB supported micro SD card slot allows one to use a memory card as internal storage which can be quite handy.
The hardware is powered by one of the two drawbacks of the device, a 5200 mAh battery. The second drawback being the internal memory. NVidia advertised the tab for gamers and believe me, even for 2015, 2GB of RAM on a heavy use device is quite below average. I cannot run many apps at once, i.e., not many background refreshes are allowed without a few crashing. Moreover, the beautiful graphics of the games cannot be enjoyed much as the battery leaves us with much to be wanted. The max I could get out of it was about 1.5 hrs of gameplay followed by about 2 hours of charge.
The software which the tab came with didn’t age very well. There is a lot of bloat in it, the NVidia shield HUB, a picture editor/painting app in Squid, NVidia Dabbler (for a stylus) and none of these could be removed. As it approached 2017 there was a lot of lag in basic interface operations, needing restarts many a time to get some control back.
There is however something to appreciate NVidia about. The tab originally came with Android lollipop (5.0). With regular software updates, they were arguably the best software supporters, all the way until Nougat(7.0). (The first update came in Dec 2015 and the last came in 2018 – almost 3 years!!!). This was way more than any other companies.
The experience of using this tablet is the highlight even to this day. The bright screen and the audio are still one of the best out there. Though I have taken the custom ROM route, the support for the video and audio is still top-notch. PubG is difficult, have to use at low settings. NFS NL works brilliantly, so does Injustice gods among us.
Too bad that they couldn’t follow up on another device. In today’s date, NVidia could still produce a so-called Shield tab 3 with their proprietary CPU/GPU, 6-8 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, all covered with the same display and audio with type-C port. 7000 mAH battery while at it and you have a gem of a device. It supported 4K output back then, for sure it will do so in today’s hardware days too. Looking forward to such a future.