The Shield Portable comes prepared in form and function too. A micro-USB port for charging and data, 3.5mm headphone jacks and a mini-HDMI port and a mircoSD card slot, so you have a fair variety of connections to go with. The Portable when open with the screen shows a 5″ 720p touch screen under the hood, dual speakers and the familiar eight button gamepad layout with dual analog sticks and a directional pad to the left. The backlit NVIDIA logo serves as your power and home screen button shortcut.
Don’t let those silver speakers fool you, they are powerful and loud enough and the portable has the best audio for a gaming handheld although some would just double up and hook up the portable to an external bluetooth audio system to get more out of it but it does make a neat little boom box if you use the Shield for more than it was designed to do. Gamers will appreciate all of this with the rubber coated outer shell which is comfortable to use for a long gaming session but it’s not something I found comfortable to take with me on the go considering the weight and a carrying case doesn’t help and that’s the primary fallout of the Shield Portable. Make no mistake, this is a gaming device at the end of the day. The screen and controls are designed just for that and while you can control the interface with the gamepad controls, and even enabling an on screen cursor and keyboard, it will feel taxing to use it as a device for reading or browsing and with no camera included, it’s only natural you look towards the Shield Tablet.
Table of Contents
Display
Among most gaming handhelds, the Nvidia Shield has one of the best looking screens, with 720p resolution “retinal” 5-inch IPS touch screen. I managed to play a bit of Civilization Beyond:Earth on PC and it looked great. Android games that are native to the Portable also look gorgeous. The screen looks good however you look at it, I found this to be a benefit playing it outside and because of the build, there wasn’t any sense of fragility which makes it great not just for gaming, it works for viewing other sorts of multi media. You can even put the Shield Portable on your HDTV through the mini-hdmi port or Miracast which allows you to stream video at 1080p. Miracast does have some significant lag but it works well for streaming videos instead.
Performance
