NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet Android Lollipop Update Performance Explored

MojoKid writes Last week, NVIDIA offered information regarding its Android Lollipop update for the SHIELD Tablet and also revealed a new game bundle for it. This week, NVIDIA gave members of the press early access to the Lollipop update and it will also be rolling out to the general public sometime later today. Some of the changes are subtle, but others are more significant and definitely give the tablet a different look and feel over the original Android KitKat release. Android Lollipop introduces a new "material design" that further flattens out the look of the OS. Google seems to have taken a more minimalist approach as everything from the keyboard to the settings menus have been cleaned up considerably. Many parts of the interface don't have any markings except for the absolute necessities. While the OS definitely feels more fluid and responsive, the default look isn't always better, depending on your personal view. The app tray for example has a plain, white background which looks kind of jarring if you've using a colorful background. And finding the proper touch points for things like a settings menu or clearing notifications isn't always clear. Performance-wise, NVIDIA's Shield Tablet showed significantly better performance on Lollipop for general compute tasks in benchmarks like Mobile XPRT but lagged behind Kit Kat in graphics performance slightly, which could be attributed to driver optimization.

Comments

CM11 users already have the look available.

[Lumpy]

In the CM11 themes you can apply the Lollipop theme and pretty much make the whole phone take on the biggest changes of Lollipop without effort.

Plus the new apps are already rolling out so you can have it all today instead of waiting for February to get CM12

Enough already

[ArcadeMan]

I don't care if we're talking about Microsoft, Apple, Android or someone else. These flat, over-simplied GUIs are making things less intuitive and harder to use.

Don't hide scrollbars because they're ugly, they're there to tell us something can scroll (ex: horizontal scrolling in the iTunes Store). The fact that I need to have my mouse cursor over the area to see it can be scrolled if a failure in user interaction.

Stop with the over-simplified icons that don't mean anything, the lack of button borders that prevents me from knowing the area I can touch to push that button (ex: iOS 8).

Stop with the GUI elements that looks like a blur on regular monitors, the pastel-color-coded shit in 16x16 pixels icons that requires 20/20 vision and absolutely zero color blindness to discern between them all (ex: Finder tags).

The list goes on and on. Hardware people have no business designing user interfaces.

Re:Enough already

[i kan reed]

Here's the thing:

Power users can manage to get through dumbed down interfaces.
Regular users get confused and give up on "smarter" interfaces.

You can see that microsoft doesn't dump their current god-awful interface design choices on Visual Studio, but anything they even remotely imagine a typical user using, they wrap in useless shiny crap.

(None of what you described, however, quite matches the evil of websites that think you want to do anything other than scroll when you scroll)

Re:Enough already

[digitalchinky]

I agree with you, one difference though. There are tablets out there that have 2560x1600 pixels or more, and people with 20/20 that want everything to be tiny. The problem is the lack of choice, most apps dont include any way to shrink the giant fisher price widgets and 20 point fonts. I know I can change dpi settings per app with root, but this doesn't address poor UI design and the trend toward bigger, more white space, and fewer configuration options.

Re:irrelevant

[jeffmflanagan]

>PC gamers hate joysticks. Mice, better performance, and mods are the only reason that PC gamers play PC games.

Why would you say something that's obviously not true except for a subset of PC gamers as if it's a fact? Not all PC gamers are at desks in bedrooms at their parent's house. Some of us PC game from our own couches with XBox 360 controllers. We do it for the much improved graphics and better performance than console games.

./ Headlines are becoming unparseable

[Overzeetop]

Is it a name or an acronym, an adjective or a noun - or maybe a verb. Who the fuck knows. Is it SHIELD or Shield? Is it made by NVIDIA (And should get a possessive 's)? Do we need to know that NVIDIA is the maker at all, or is it important that the Shield (or SHIELD) is the particular tablet (do we need to know it's a tablet?) that you've benchmarked. Should we know what is happening (performance explored - or was it just a benchmark?) and then find out it was under a particular release. And why Lollipop - aren't we past codenames now to understand that this is the official Android 5.0 (pre)release?

If you're going for obscure and useless, you guys are nailing these headlines. Why not take the next step and just pick 8 random words from the summary and post those in any order?

(ob: now get off my lawn)