NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet gets Android Lollipop Nov 18th; GRID cloud gaming open beta begins soon
NVIDIA had some exciting news to announce this morning. For starters, the company has confirmed that they will be shipping Android 5.0 Lollipop to SHIELD Tablets starting November 18th. This was following a promise that the tablet would get the upgrade by the end of November.
We were hoping it wouldn’t be closer to the end point than the early or mid-way mark so this is very welcome news. As the SHIELD Tablet doesn’t really have a custom user interface you can expect all the Lollipop goodness as Google intended, as well as upgraded NVIDIA Hub and NVIDIA Dabbler apps.
NVIDIA also announced that they’re finally ready to let folks in on GRID, their cloud-gaming platform that lets you play PC quality games on-demand over your network. GRID will support over 20 games to start, including Batman Arkham Asylum, Psychonauts and Borderlands 2.
The service is scheduled to roll out in North America this month, western Europe in December and Asia next year. The kicker is that GRID will be entirely free for SHIELD Tablet and SHIELD Portable users through June 30th 2015, after which we imagine there will be some sort of monthly subscription to keep playing.
Finally, if you’re in the market for a SHIELD Tablet this holiday season NVIDIA’s throwing in a Half-Life bundle that includes Half-Life 2 , Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Portal. Not a bad crop of games to put that ridiculous Tegra K1 chipset to the test. Let us know if you’re looking forward to any of this goodness on your SHIELD devices in the comments below.
[via NVIDIA]