In Hand!

[WallaceD]

Initial impressions: extremely good build quality. Good ergonomics. Excellent screen. Almost no lag at all.

Haven't had a chance to play all my games, but I can say without hesitation that Shield is the only way to play Dead Trigger. It's AMAZING, simply put.

As you can see from the pic, I'm downloading Shadowgun. Can't wait to play it.

The only issue I've had is with a stuck "X" key. The physical button got stuck in the down position, but the actual register did not. (Meaning the button worked fine, it just never retracted.) That problem fixed itself and hasn't happened since.

 

[WallaceD]

Forgot to mention, the audio on the Shield is fantastic. Little speakers, for sure. But the audio quality is really quite good. I'm impressed.

 

[WallaceD]

OK, so I've had some more time with the Shield.

This thing is absolutely, astonishingly fun. Shadowgun and Shadowgun: Deadzone are incredible on the Shield. This is the way those games were meant to be played. I can say the same about the stuff by Vector Unit (Riptide GP, GP2, Shine Runner, Beach Buggy Blitz). On the Shield, these games are just plain FUN and effortless to play. The Tegra optimizations make them even better.

I have had (and will have) zero experience with PC streaming. I bought the Shield as a mobile Android gaming system. As that, it excels. Hands down the best Android gaming experience thus far. (Even beats the Ouya... ahem.)

I experimented with some regular apps, too. Facebook, Plume... both work as expected. It's actually very easy to use the Shield as a social media consumption device. It's not as intuitive to actually post items, but the onscreen keyboard works fine. It's a bit awkward, of course, but it works.

The Shield works great as a video-viewing device, too. It wouldn't be my first choice due to the screen size, but the *quality* of the screen is outstanding.

I could go on and on, but I feel like I'm just stating what others have mentioned previously.

I am very pleased with my purchase. Yeah, it's too damn expensive. But it's soooo nice. If it were $100 cheaper, it'd be a no-brainer.

 

[SuperTongue]

Any chance you'd be able to test that HDMI-out?

 

[Joe the Insider]

Some people are experiencing problems with PC streaming. What is your experience so far with it?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

[WallaceD]

To answer the questions posed:

I have not had a chance to test the HDMI out. And I won't be using it to stream from PC, so I have no idea if it works or not.

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

Any chance you'd be able to test that HDMI-out?

HDMI out works just fine. Audio is passed through HDMI unless you plug in headphones, then it comes through the headphone jack.

 

[isamu99]

Excellent impressions Wallace, thanks! Now test out MAME4Droid and RetroArch and tell us how it functions as an emulator machine! How does:

Mortal Kombat II
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
Tekken Tag
Rave Racer
San Francisco Rush The Rock: Alcatraz
California Speed
Cruisn'USA
GTI Club
Virtua Fighter 2
Virtua Racing

......run on the Shield?

 

[worknman]

FYI: Mame4Droid dev on androidforums.com says:

I'm the mame4droid developer.

And yes.

Shield runs all 2d games at full speed like umk...

In fact, I have added specific support for shield on mame4droid reloaded and runs out of the box all games great.

Enjoy.

I'm pretty stoked, but waiting until the price drops, or I have to travel... whichever comes first