A few days ago, Nvidia showed off the production mold that it's using to produce the casing for Project Shield. Now, the company has moved on to more important details, like release dates and pricing for the handheld gaming device.
Nvidia this morning announced that the company will drop the 'project' from Project Shield. The product is officially now just 'Shield' so there'll be no Project Natal/Kinect renaming going on here. If you signed up for updates via the Shield wesbite, you can pre-order starting today. For everyone else, pre-orders for Shied will kick off on May 21, with the console set to ship in June. Pricing is set at $349 and the device will be available via Newegg, GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers.
Shield is a 5-inch Android-based mounted on a game pad. It sports a quad-core Tegra 4 SoC, a 5-inch capacitive multi-touch screen, and Google's full-blown Android "Jelly Bean" OS. There are also two built-in speakers, Wireless-N connectivity, HDMI output, a microUSB port, a microSD card slot, 32 GB of internal storage and 2 GB of RAM.
Our own Kevin Parrish went hands on with Shield at GTC 2013. Check it out here.