So it's officially CES season again, which means for about ten days every gadget blog on earth turns into the same liveblog wearing a different logo. I usually try to ignore the pre-show noise until the actual show floor opens, but last night I broke my own rule and sat up till almost midnight refreshing a liveblog for Nvidia's Sunday-night press event, the one they always cram in before the show officially opens so they don't have to share headlines with Samsung and Sony.
And I'm glad I did, because what they showed off is genuinely one of the weirder gadgets I've seen announced in a while.
It's called Project Shield (working title, apparently — Jen-Hsun Huang kept calling it that on stage like it was already final). Picture a game controller, the kind with two analog sticks and a D-pad, except bolted to the top of it is a 5-inch touchscreen on a hinge that flips up like a laptop lid. It runs Android. It's got their new Tegra 4 chip inside. And the pitch isn't "here's a new tablet," it's "here's a box that streams PC games off your gaming rig in the next room and lets you play them on this thing from the couch."
I'll admit my first reaction watching the liveblog photos come in was just "that's a strange looking object." It doesn't look like a phone, doesn't look like a Vita, doesn't look like anything already on shelves. Somebody at Nvidia clearly decided the screen-flipping-up-over-a-controller thing was the move and just committed to it. No price, no release date beyond the usual "later this year" hand-wave, which after eleven years of writing about gadget announcements I've learned to read as "ask us again in five or six months."
Here's my actual opinion on it, for what it's worth: streaming PC games wirelessly to a handheld is the part that has me curious, not the Android bits. Half the reason I never got into Android gaming is that touchscreen controls for anything that isn't a puzzle game feel awful to me, my thumbs just aren't built for glass. A real D-pad and real sticks fixes that complaint instantly, at least on paper. Whether the streaming actually holds up without lag is a completely different question and one nobody's going to be able to answer from a stage demo with the room's wifi pre-optimized by an Nvidia engineer standing six feet away. Stage demos always work. That's what they're for.
Small tangent, but this is the same week I finally dug my old Game Gear out of a box in the closet to show my nephew what "handheld gaming used to look like," six AA batteries and all, and it's funny timing that a company is out here trying to reinvent the category the same week I'm nostalgic about the worst battery life ever shipped in a consumer product. That thing ate batteries like it was personally offended by them.
Anyway. The bigger CES stories are obviously going to be the TVs (I already know I'm going to see forty headlines this week about curved screens and OLED panels that cost more than my car), and I'm sure plenty of people will write those up better than I would. But press-event night is always my favorite part of the week because it's the one moment before the actual show floor turns everything into a blur of booth numbers and hand sanitizer stations. You get one weird, focused announcement with a company's full attention on it, and this year that was a controller with a screen glued to the top of it.
I don't know if Shield ships, or ships well, or ships at a price anyone actually wants to pay. Nvidia's made hardware promises before that didn't quite land the way the demo suggested. But I like that they tried something that doesn't look like everything else in the case at Best Buy. Most CES announcements this week are going to be minor spec bumps on stuff you already own. This one at least made me sit up at 11:40 PM hitting refresh, which is more than I can say for last year's crop.
More CES stuff coming as the actual show opens Tuesday, assuming I can stay awake for it.