Codenames for a new remote and gamepad for NVIDIA's popular Shield TV have been found in its source code, making their likely launch soon, probably alongside a new Shield TV.
NVIDIA first began their unlikely Shield product line with the ‘Portable' in 2013, an Android gaming device and screen crammed in a gamepad which whilst well-received, had little success for being such a niche product.
They followed this up in 2014 with the Shield Tablet (and a slightly updated Shield Tablet K1) which were incredibly well-received, great devices which saw more success for being a gaming-focused normal product which offered great value. NVIDIA also received much praise for their fantastic software support, and hold the record for most-updated Android portable devices.
Finally we get to NVIDIA's first Shield TV device in 2015, which ran Google's new Android TV software with NVIDIA's brand new and uber-powerful ‘Tegra X1' processor, which remains amongst the most graphically powerful mobile chips available and which is used in Nintendo's current Switch console.
The Shield TV was incredibly well received and rather popular as nothing had yet, and still has not achieved the same levels of performance.
Despite having developed more powerful mobile-applicable chips in the Tegra X2 since, NVIDIA released only an updated model of the Shield TV in 2017 with a smaller chassis (for the base variant) alongside massively upgraded new remote and gamepad peripherals.
I personally own one of those 2017 Shield TV's along with its peripherals and I must say its a fantastic device with a great track record of software support.
Well, history done, NVIDIA looks to be working on a new set of peripherals for their Shield TV based on new codenames discovered within the Shield TV's open-source codebase, and naturally one would expect new peripherals to launch alongside a new Shield TV itself.
I would love to see new Shield products launch with an actually upgrade chip, as I can't imagine NVIDIA would use the same 4-5 year old chip again, however I can't really imagine how else they could improve the device as it already supports and runs everything it possibly could given it has 4K and HDR support.
The peripherals, however, could see many improvements most notably in wifi-connectivity as the connection between the remote in particular, and the Shield TV can be very hit-and-miss at times which can be infuriating. The gamepad could also see some durability improvements and software improvements because the 2017 version's buttons stick sometimes, and when used on a computer it connects via proprietary drivers which most games don't support, though I wouldn't expect that to change.
Of course, there is also the change that NVIDIA will simply launch new peripherals for their 2017 Shield TV, as unlikely as that seems to me, though I can't see much of a point in such a release as there'd be little reason to upgrade when the ones you already have work perfectly fine.
Either way it'll be interesting to see what and when NVIDIA does announce.
Source: XDA Developers
