SHIELD Tablet Lollipop
Today was a day of good news for all Nvidia Shield Tablet owners and potential owners. Nvidia announced today that the Lollipop 5.0 update and the new GRID gaming service are coming to the Shield Tablet in an update on November 18th. Nvidia Also confirmed that the Green Box they teased yesterday is in fact Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One, and Portal.
Today via the Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) blog the company let people know about the upcoming capabilities and content they have made for its Shield Tablet. The news of the Lollipop 5.0 update that we have known for a while was confirmed to be scheduled for release on November 18th. The update brings Android’s new material design and performance benefits. The update will also have an update for the popular Nvidia Dabbler application that has updates in the user interface, full support for layers, and interestingly the ability to stream the app via Twitch (which the tablet already supports for games). The blog also confirmed that Half-Life Episode One is coming to Android, and it has been optimized for the Nvidia Shield Tablet. This game will be part of the new Green Box bundle that will be included free with the 32GB/LTE version of the Shield Tablet. Also confirmed were new games that are optimized for the Shield Tablet. These games are OddWorld: Stranger’s Wrath, Pure Pool, Strike Suit Zero, and Turbo Dismount.
The biggest surprise was the announcement of the long in-beta GRID gaming service. This will harnesses state-of-the-art Nvidia GPU servers to deliver a GeForce GTX gaming experience on SHIELD devices. The lineup already includes 20 AAA game titles including Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands 2, and Psychonauts. The service will be adding new titles every week. Essentially this will be like Netflix for games that users can stream right to the Shield devices to play. But the best part is that the GRID service will be free on Shield devices (both the tablet and the portable) through June 30, 2015. This is great that Nvidia is giving users more than 7 months of the gaming service free for owners who have already bought devices. This will help make up for the fact that the Green Box is only available with new purchases of the 32GB/LTE tablet and will possibly encourage people to buy SHIELD devices if they weren’t already planning to.
