Nvidia Shield has found its way into the hands of those brave guys at iFixit which took it apart in order to show us how well did Nvidia manage to squeeze in all those nice features inside a standard size game controller. Showing the quite unique cooling system, the Tegra chipset and three-cell battery as well as concluding that it will receive six out of ten repairability score.


In case you missed it before, the Nvidia Shield is built around a gaming-grade controller and a flip-up 5-inch 1280x720 screen. The heart of it is the Nvidia Tegra 4 chip clocked at 1.9GHz paired up with 2GB of RAM. It also features 16GB of internal storage expandable by microSD card slot, special audio with stereo bass reflex, 802.11n 2x2 MIMO WiFi and a three-cell 7350mAh/28.8Whr battery. It started to sell earlier this week and first reviews have been sort of mixed, noting that everything works well and looks good but the lack of good games on Android puts it in an awkward position.

The tear down at iFixit showed a rather unique and quite good cooling system that draws the air from the front of the device and exhaust it out the back as well as the fact that three-cell 7350mAh battery is actually upgradeable, at least in theory since it is permanently attached to the PCB. The battery and the fact that the screen is is quite hard to replace, gave the Shield a 6 out of 10 repairability score which is not that low in the world of smartphones or tablets, but quite low if you compare it to Sony PS Vita which managed to get 8 out 10.

In any case, Nvidia Shield looks like a decent hand-held gaming device and all we need now is Nvidia to push harder in order to bring Android games and gaming to a whole new level.












Source: iFixit.com.