Nvidia Shield is a game geek’s dream device (hands-on review)

Nvidia’s Shield gaming device debuts today as the geek’s ultimate gadget. At $299, it’s a steep price, considering you can get a home game console for that much. But this portable gaming device can do a lot, and it goes a long way toward bringing better quality and wider variety games to both handhelds and living room TVs.

Ever since Shield was announced in January, the question at hand has been whether Nvidia is really serious about making Shield into a successful alternative to both traditional gaming handhelds and consoles. For sure, this is a way to get Nvidia’s Tegra mobile processor chips back into gaming, after it was shut out of the game consoles and mobile game players. That’s a ploy that rings of desperation. But Shield is also part of a crafty plan to bring Android into a powerful game handheld, take Steam games into living room TVs, and find a way to extend Nvidia’s cloud gaming technology.