XDA Reducing Power: FCC Documents Reveal a Look at a SHIELD Portable Refresh

Thursday, January 12, 2017

FCC Documents Reveal a Look at a SHIELD Portable Refresh

3 years ago, NVIDIA introduced a tablet that re-imagined portable gaming. That tablet was the NVIDIA SHIELD Portable. While considered small for a tablet (with a screen size of 5 inches), it came with a full sized console controller attached. Unfortunately, it was prohibitively expensive for many consumers and suffered from a severe drought of game selection, so the portable gaming tablet failed to make waves in the market.

But NVIDIA's mobile gaming selection has massively expanded since those days. With the growing popularity of the company's newer SHIELD line-up, NVIDIA has convinced many major game publishers to re-consider whether or not they should publish their titles on NVIDIA's platform. Thus, many fans of mobile gaming have been eagerly awaiting the day for when NVIDIA finally decides to refresh their portable gaming tablet.

Thankfully, it looks like we will no longer have to speculate about a new SHIELD Portable tablet. Yesterday, on the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) website, a few documents were uploaded that give us a brief look at an update to the NVIDIA SHIELD Portable. There are two notable documents we'll be taking a look at: a User Manual and the External Pictures submitted for the device.

We can gather quite a fair amount of information from these documents. In the User Manual, we can find that the new Shield will have a 5.66 inch screen this time around with a "1440×810" HD display capable of outputting at a 1080p resolution at 60fps with very low latency. Other specifications found in the user manual include: a Tegra X1 processor, a single Micro-USB port, a Headphone jack, a Micro-SD slot, and what appears to be an HDMI port.

Interestingly, the there's a line in the manual that states "once finished with SHIELD Welcome, the Android TV Setup begins" which we find to be a rather clear indicator of the software that will come with the updated SHIELD Portable. The original portable was released with regular Android Jelly Bean with an upgrade to Lollipop. The newer will seemingly be running Android TV, either the Marshmallow or hopefully Nougat version, which gives us a good indication of the media consumption capabilities available.

Also included in the manual is a guide to the functions of all of the physical buttons on the device. Pictures can be found below.

The next interesting document that can be found on the FCC website is a document containing external pictures of the updated Shield Portable. The overall design of the device appears to be the same as the older model, but with a few slight color changes. When the screen is fully open, the SHIELD Portable is roughly 240mm x 160mm. With the lid closed, the dimensions drop to 140mm x 160mm. A gallery of the images contained in the document are reproduced below.