Can You Really Use the Nvidia Shield as a Desktop?

Final Thoughts

I mostly attempted these little tasks as an experiment, just to see how much value for money I can squeeze out of the Nvidia Shield. It’s already proven its self to me as a powerful gaming device, able to play games on the go such as GTA: San Andreas, Portal, Half Life 2 and more on the Tegra 4 GPU. It’s also already proven to be a powerful emulation device, capable of running everything from the Super Nintendo to the Sega Dreamcast with relative ease, and it even allowed me to stream games to my bathroom, negating the need to ever read the back of shampoo bottle again. Now it looks like I’ve found even more uses for this little box of tricks.

It is capable of being used as a desktop replacement, it is powerful and fast enough, with enough app support that I can do everything from editing photos, to writing this article on it (not kidding, I really am). However, it does come with a few technical shortfalls that I hope Nvidia address in the much rumoured Nvidia Shield 2. The first one being the power input; This is catered for via the microUSB port and when using any USB OTG devices such as the USB HUB, a keyboard or anything else really, you cannon charge the device. That means that while I can use this for day to day work, I’m limited to the battery life, although using it in this way for word processing and browsing the web I’m getting around 7 hours! and a little less if I start watching videos or playing games, yet that is still better than I get from most notebooks I’ve used.

There is a work around to the battery issue, but that means using wireless devices, such as a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo, thus freeing up the MicroUSB slot for charging and you can still use the MicroSD slot for extra storage, as well as online storage when connected to the internet via apps like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive etc.

It’s also a little impractical at times, as carrying a notebook is obviously easier than taking an Nvidia Shield, keyboard and mouse combo around with you. However, if you’re really in a tight spot and you already have the Shield at your disposal, with a need for a relatively portable work station, then at least you know that you’re not out of options.

The HDMI output is great, as it means you don’t have to rely on the 5″ display, however there is nothing stopping you from doing so and should you wish to continue working via the touch screen when your sat on the bus, you can.

I always take the Shield with me when travelling anyway, it’s a powerful gaming device and a great multimedia player since it even supports 4K video output, perfect for streaming high resolution content; plus it has great speakers that are more than enough for blasting out some music in a more social environment. Having this extra desktop functionality is a welcome bonus and it is certainly something I hope to see expanded with any future Shield hardware releases such as the Shield 2.

I’m not about to throw out my SLI gaming rig just yet, but should my desktop be out of action for any reason, at least I know I can plug in the Shield, hook up my gaming headset, keyboard, mouse, external storage, speakers and more, and still get on with my work and some gaming.