Gaming tablets are extremely niche, but NVIDIA managed to dominate that minuscule part of a shrinking market with the Shield Tablet, for what it’s worth. The device was surprisingly well-received, in both reviews and sales, but the company was forced to recall most of the tablets that it shipped due to a potentially dangerous lithium-ion battery problem, but it’s back now. Obviously the new Shield comes with a different battery, but NVIDIA also fixed a bunch of other issues that people had with the device, and even cut the price of it down to a mere $199.99.
Earlier this year, Nvidia recalled its Shield Tablet over problems with the lithium-ion battery. The company has put the tablet back on sale and given the base model a whopping price cut, from $299 to $199 for the 16GB flavor. At that price, the Shield Tablet is a steal, considering its overall performance, build quality, and features. Even better, this new version seems to fix the nagging touch-screen issues that were widely reported on Shield 1.0. While I didn’t review the first Shield Tablet for ExtremeTech, I do own one, and the touch screen has always been a little dodgy. It works perfectly in the desktop or in-browser, but often had trouble picking up multi-touches in the one Android game I play on a regular basis — Castle Clash. This was an issue unique to the Shield — the game ran perfectly well on multiple Android smartphones and devices. The issue would typically resolve itself after I attempted a multi-touch zoom-in / zoom-out several times, but reoccurred each time a new area of the game was loaded. While it didn’t prevent play, it was annoying. Factory resets, new OTA updates, and reinstalling the game never had much impact on the issue.
