Hand held gaming: New Era about to begin?

Right now, what is the device where most games are played? It’s the mobile no doubt.

Let there be dedicated consoles like PS3, XBOX 360 and Wii U fight among themselves and the PC, selling games that are breath-takingly awesome in terms of graphics and AI both, while a huge amount of population is busy flinging birds at some green pigs.

At least for these consoles, there is yet, a dedicated market. A set of people (including yours truly) that would buy a PS3 to play games on a 40” TV screen. We all have TVs and thus these consoles still hold a small place in our homes. They are also diverging in other segments in an attempt to become a complete home entertainment package with deals with content providers like Hulu etc.

Unfortunately though, similar cannot be said about their smaller brethren. The handheld gaming devices like PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS who are fighting for their lives here.

With phones reaching 5 inch 720p screens and Quad core processors, they are becoming to these consoles, what PC is to PS3 and XBOX 360.

Also, the multiple utilizations of the phones make them a better choice than the hand held consoles. The games too are cheaper and now, even the superior games (worthy of consoles) are making their appearance in the mobile world (both Android and iOS).

To add to that, in this edition of CES 2013, Nvidia has announced a hand held gaming product, codenamed – Project Shield.

This handheld device is not just NVidia’s entrance to hand held market, it is also its showcase of its latest Tegra 4 mobile processor. Based on Quad core ARM Cortex – A15 processers, it will be faster than PS Vita which has Cortex-A9 (Quad core).

The hardware is basic console type with a 5” screen (720p) and gaming controls for having a complete utilization of the console. The tweak that is of interest is that it runs on Android 4.x (JellyBean). This means that despite being a gaming console, at its heart, it is an android device and will have most of the functionalities in it.

It will have access to Google Play and Tegrazone, giving us a lot of games to play with.

The punchline of the story though is the console’s ability to stream PC games. This is done from Steam and Project Shield is packed with enough hardware to pull this off.