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NVIDIA's Shield Tablet gets Lollipop, Grid service announced for Asia

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 14 Nov 2014, 9:49am

NVIDIA's Shield Tablet gets Lollipop, Grid service announced for Asia

 The Shield's may not be as widespread as it's direct competitor, the PS Vita, but it has the advantage of being able to play more games.

NVIDIA's recently announced that their Shield Tablet set to get the new Android Lollipop update soon, on November 18. Outside of the Nexus tablets (the Nexus 9 and Nexus 7), the Shield will be one of the very first tablets to get access to Google's new OS.

On top of that, the company's also announced that the Grid streaming service is entering full service (although NVIDIA's labeling it as a 'preview') soon. The service, similar to the Sony's Playstation Now streaming service (currently in Open Beta in the US), allows users to stream games straight from NVIDIA's servers to their device.

The Grid service is also coming to the Shield portable.

According to NVIDIA, the Grid service will be free till June 30 2015, as it'll allow time for them to get all the kinks worked out. As such, users of the Shield Tablet will be able to play all the games in the Grid's library (which includes Borderlands 2 and Arkham City) for free for a limited time. While the Grid's library doesn't have access to the latest and greatest games, it does have a sizeable collection that's steadily growing and should prove useful if a user wants to catch up on their backlog without wanting to buy the game physically or on online services like Steam.

The Grid is already available in California (and has been for some time now) but it's getting a North American release later this month. The service will then expand to Europe in December with an Asian rollout expected to begin in 2015. This is great news for local gamers for a number of reasons. While indirect, the announcement that the Grid is coming to Asia can be taken that the Shield Tablet and/or the Shield portable (or maybe even another unannounced iteration or upgrade of it) will be coming to local shores as well. Another potential good news? The Grid will be free till June 30 2015, so if the tablet or portable launches in the months before, gamers here also get to play the service's games for free.

While we did get inside access to Sony's Playstation Now service when it was in Closed Beta, we were unable to try it out due to the servers being too far from Singapore. The service detects your connection speed and if it's not optimal, simply doesn't let you connect. We haven't tried the Grid service though so we can't really say if it does deliver on its promise of being relatively lag free. But if there are Asian servers like NVIDIA plans, that'll definitely be a step in the right direction.

The Grid will make use of another of NVIDIA's recently announced apps, the Shield Hub. To use it, you'll need to fulfill some requirements first, which includes an up-to-date Shield device, an active broadband connection with a minimum of 10 Mbps download, and a home network that has a maximum of 60 ms of ping time to reach a Grid server, plus a 5 GHz Wi-Fi router that’s compatible with Nvidia’s GameStream tech. If you successfully jump through those hoops, you're all set.

Source: NVIDIA Blog

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