latest
It's been a few years since NVIDIA released a SHIELD Tablet, but it's been keeping them up to date with regular OTAs. However, this appears to be the end of the line. NVIDIA won't push an update to Oreo for the SHIELD Tablet and Tablet K1.
NVIDIA mostly focuses on the SHIELD Android TV these days, but it hasn't forgotten about the SHIELD Tablet. After getting the device updated to Nougat in February, NVIDIA has sent out two small updates. That includes today's v5.2 update. The changelog shows nothing major, but it's nice of NVIDIA to keep this tablet up-to-date.
NVIDIA has one of the best track records for software support among Android manufacturers. The original Nvidia Shield tablet, originally released in 2014 with Android 4.4 KitKat, is still being updated and currently runs Android 7.0 Nougat. Now both the original Shield Tablet and the newer Tablet K1 have a new update.
NVIDIA is on fire this year. Not only did the company release new SHIELD TV boxes, it also quickly updated them to Android 7.0 Nougat and upgraded the older SHIELD TV as well, then said it would bring the same update to the SHIELD Tablet, and here we are: promise fulfilled.
NVIDIA is getting ready to roll out Android 7.0 to the SHIELD Android TV, and of course it's shipping the new SHIELD with Android 7.0 pre-installed. But what of the SHIELD Tablet and Tablet K1? There's been little word on what's up with these devices, but NVIDIA's SHIELD Hub account on Google+ says that update is happening. It's not the strongest confirmation you can get, but we'll take anything we can get right now.
NVIDIA is pretty good about regular updates for its SHIELD line, and the Tablet twins are the recipients of the latest bumps. Update version 4.3 for the original SHIELD Tablet (the one with the stylus) and 1.4 for the newer SHIELD Tablet K1 are basically identical, and in both cases the biggest addition is an update to Android 6.0 that brings the security patches to July of this year. The rest of the changes are pretty minor bug fixes and other small adjustments:
NVIDIA is rolling out a new OTA for its SHIELD Tablet K1 today, the first one in a few months. This device has been running Marshmallow since last year, but there's still room for improvement. The 1.3 update adds compatibility with Android 6.0's professional audio requirements, better control of nav button position, and more.
The SHIELD Tablet is still going strong, right there with the SHIELD Android TV. (The original SHIELD Portable, not so much. Hey NVIDIA, where's that SHIELD 2 you guys were working on?) The original tablet and the slightly newer variant, the K1, were both updated to Android 6.0 a couple of months ago after a rocky start. But for some reason the K1 is getting the latest incremental update first. K1 update 1.2 adds Android 6.0.1, including the security patches from March.
While a video published last week teased it, NVIDIA's new (kind of) Shield Tablet K1 officially made its Marshmallow debut today - the update is available right now. NVIDIA just published an announcement on its forums, from which we've excerpted the changelog you see below.
When NVIDIA reinvented its SHIELD Tablet into the SHIELD Tablet K1 about a month ago and released it on the market, it promised that although the tablet was shipping with Lollipop, an update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow was coming before the end of the year. A month has passed and it seems that NVIDIA will make good on its promise as the update looks to be in its final testing stages.
In my personal opinion, NVIDIA's SHIELD Tablet has been one of the better Android tablets on the market for the last year and a half (give or take). Sure, it's had its ups and downs — a mandatory recall due to battery issues back in August probably hurt it more than anything, but NVIDIA did what was right and replaced all affected units.Around that same time, SHIELD Tablet as we knew it was EOL'd. Initially we kind of assumed that this was because NVIDIA was prepping to release SHIELD Tablet 2, but we haven't seen nor heard anything about that. Now the company is bringing back the original SHIELD Tablet, albeit with a few changes and a nice new price tag.First off, let's talk about what's different. The basic hardware is the same — eight-inch 1080p display, 2 GB RAM, Tegra K1 processor. It's currently running Android 5.1.1, but NVIDIA already plans to push Marshmallow to it (along with existing SHIELD Tablet units) by the end of the year. The primary change on the hardware front is that the stylus has been removed (even the bay is gone). The display technology is still there for users who wants to pick up a stylus of their own and use it, so they didn't kill it completely — it's just not part of the package now. The DirectStylus options are also missing from settings, which makes sense since most of that was controlling what happens when the stylus is removed from the bay. No stylus bay, no need for options. I miss the screenshot tools and stylus-only mode on this model.