The Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 has been announced, and is a gaming-centric tab just like its predecessor. However, the new Shield Tablet K1 is slimmer and gets better pricing. It costs only $199 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only of the K1, which is directly $100 cheaper than the original Shield Tablet’s 16GB variant. This aggressive pricing should give a new chance to the tablet to set its feet firm into the gaming tablet market.
The Shield Tablet K1 gets an 8-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixel and a pixel density of 283ppi. The tablet flaunts a Nvidia Tegra K1 SoC under its hood, with a 2.2GHz Cortex0A15 quad-core processor and 192-core GeForce Kepler GPU. This configuration makes the K1 one of the most powerful android gaming tablets in the market. The tablet can also stream games directly from a GeForce graphics card-compatible PC or from the NVIDIA Grid network.
The company hasn’t altered the design of the Shield Tablet much, and the K1 gets only a bit of minor enhancements here and there. The ShieldDirect Stylus 2 does not come with the tablet and is a separate accessory priced at $19.99. Also, there’s no charger or adapter inside the box, which is obviously a cost-cutting measure. You can get a magnetic keyboard cover for the tablet by paying an extra $39.99. If you’re interested in transforming the Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 into a gaming console, you can spend $59.99 on the Shield Controller gamepad.
Though the K1 runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out-of-the-box, Nvidia has made it official that the tablet will soon be getting the Marshmallow update.