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

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.