I picked ones of these up today from gamestop of all places. My amazon order from the other day had yet to ship. anyways, as a person who owns way too many tablets (note 8.0, tab pro 8.4, note 10.1 2014, surface pro 3) here's my initial thoughts...
TL;DR its awesome. just a few cons. no significant fails, just a great tab.
1. Availability. horrible. it released tuesday and i mistakenly assumed bestbuy would have them instock. (have reward pts to use). nope. the magic of the internet informed me that gamestop carries them. there was 1 store in the KC metro that had "low stock" but none available when i tried to reserve one tuesday. checking amazon all week after bestbuy was a fail showed anywhere from out of stock, to shipping in 2-4 weeks. then late wednesday i checked again and it was now "instock" but may take 1-2 days to process. wtf? tried that but got lucky with GS today and have cancelled my amazon order. anyways, stock availability of the tablet itself sucks, but even more so is no one anywhere has the cover or gamepad. ive seen mid Aug dates for the gamepad i think at GS. amazon is just out of stock on both with no ETA. how can nvidia tout this GAMING tablet but neglect to release the gamepad that so ties together the gaming and their touted "console mode" on the tv. its bad enough no bundle options exist, but they couldve at least released them at the same time.
*off my soapbox*
2. The physical tablet. The tablet itself is a fantastic piece of tech to hold in hand. very solid, no creaking, good heft (not too heavy tho its no featherweight), good materials. the soft-touch back is great. it also just looks cool with its all black exterior. no markings on the front at all and only SHIELD on the back. very well done. My only complaint so far is the power button. its very mushy or soft. no real tactile feedback that you've pressed it in far enough to engage the contacts. the volume rocker is similar but not nearly as bad. if the power button matched the feel of the volume rocker, i'd probably not even complain.
Size is good. unscientifically, its the same height as my tab pro 8.4, just a touch thicker and slightly narrower. the narrowness actually is a good thing; much easier to palm it from the back. the extra bezel on the top/bottom (where the speakers are) actually provide nice extra areas to hold without touching the screen and inadvertently swiping something. weight wise, its heavier than the tab pro, and a little lighter than my note 8 which is rocking a sammy bookcover case. without i think it could be too close to tell in hand, though the specs would favor the note 8 by a few grams. to state the obvious, the 10.1 note and surface are much heavier.
3. The softwares Ive not played with it much since i did just get it today. but its nice seeing a plain old vanilla android OS (for the most part). having used samsung tabs mostly and rocking the note 2 and now 3, ive been in sammy land for a while, though i always run nova over the touchwiz launcher. this is also my first tab or phone with the onscreen controls and no physical home button. its actually kinda awesome. the way it moves itself when rotated to landscape is great. no worries about the capacitive buttons getting touched. there is almost no bloat on this. there's evernote, trine2 and a few drawing tools for the stylus and the tegra zone/shield controller stuff. aside from evernote, the other bits are, IMO, worthwhile and make sense. trine2 runs and looks great. has decent touch controls too but i look forward to a gamepad. my only complaint, when doing the setup at first boot, there was no way i could find to bring up the advanced wifi settings to see the device's MAC. there's an option on the samsung devices to do that. had to skip through the initial wifi setup to later get to the MAC in settings to put it in my router. small complaint.
4. sound, wifi, stylus, screenFor a tablet the speakers are great. for what it is, they sound way better than any of my other tablets and phones and they face you. wont shake the walls obviously, but def good for a tab. wifi is pretty mediocre so far. i hope some future updates address it. ive only used 5Ghz N so far but it doesnt take much for the signal to get real weak. sitting 1 floor down from my router, my note3 on the same 5Ghz band was conected "strong" at 108Mbits while the shield was only "good" at a palty 12Mbit. 2.4 should fair better, but that band is way more crowded in my house plus neighbors overlapping me.
As a note user for a while now on the phone and tablet front, i wasnt sure what to expect from this stylus. in my short amount of time playing around, its actually not bad. i would rate it very close to the note's. my surface is superior to all of them though. the shield stylus has an odd shaped tip for both skinny and fat size lines or brushes; likely to overcome the lack of pressure sensitivity. its also a soft rubber and feels less slick on the screen compared to the plastic tips on the notes and even the surface. some nice "air command-like" functionality exists. a pop up opens when its pulled out (can be turned off too) and you can check a box (not on by default) that shows a couple buttons on the home bar to screen grab/screen draw or enable full stylus support (ignoring your finger touches; i think thats what it does, ive not tried it but thats the gist of the description).
The screen is a quite nice. full HD and good color and viewing angles. its no amoled, but it not terrible by any means. its not what i would call a "hiDPI" device, at least compared to the the tab pro 8.4. things on the shield are all normal sized. there's a number of things on the tab pro that are pretty small because they werent designed for the high screen res. its mostly app support issues in this regard but i like the fact its a non-issue on the shield. if i look really close i can see pixels but in normal usage, i dont see the lower ppi being a bad thing. ive not tried to read this outside. i rarely if ever try to use my tabs outside so i cant speak to that, though ive seen some reviews claim low brightness. may be an issue for some maybe? indoors its perfectly fine. the auto brightness even works well. the tab pro tries to dim the screen too much so i have to manually set the brightness on it.
so there's my two cents on the shield. id like to speak to more of the gaming bits, but i dont have anything other than trine2 loaded on it yet and im not going to bother with hooking it to the tv for the console mode and streaming from my pc until i have the controller. so overall, i really like it. i will probably give the tab pro to my GF who's currently been using my note8. ill probably use the shield as my main go-to tablet. the surface i use for more PC things and drawing and the note10.1 2014 will be getting sold. if i had to give a rating, i'd say 9/10. For $299 its a damn good tablet, gaming focused or not. its silky smooth in everything it does. my only complaints are the power button and the wifi.
*UPDATE* used the shield a bit more today. i need to try out the 2.4 wifi still as the 5 is so bad. ugh. there appears to be some kind of dynamic contrast thing going on where the screen brightens and dims depending on the content showing. the nvidia forums mention something about PRISM being the culprit and the shield portable having the same issue. it showed up in an update so hopefully they can make it go away or at least optional in a future update. the gamestream stuff is a bit wonky and not working so well for me. the only "game" that shows is steam. it opens in big picture mode but once i click my library, it seems to get stuck and never loads it. have to kill the app. none of my other games will show up to stream directly. even if streaming worked, it would probably be crap on the 5ghz wifi with the poor reception.