NVIDIA’s long-serving gaming tablet, the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet K1, has been around for a while now – enough to see Lollipop, Marshmallow, and recently this year, Nougat software. But with the launch of Android Oreo, the upgrade question looms again. Will this gaming tablet get to Android 8.0? It seems that the answer will be negative this time.
Manuel Guzman, who works on software quality assurance at NVIDIA, may have inadvertently announced that both the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet and the SHIELD Tablet K1 will not be getting Android Oreo. These tablets were updated to Android Nougat early this year, but according to Guzman, Nougat will be the last software upgrade for both.
In most cases, this is understandable. While the hardware and specs of the SHIELD Tablet K1 is still impressive in this day and age, it is already going on 2 years old (3 years for the original SHIELD Tablet). The NVIDIA Tegra K1 chipset can probably hack running Android Oreo, but there’s so much new technology going on in the new Android platform that the specs might not be able to keep up.
But the upside of this is that NVIDIA will continue to update the tablets with Google’s security patches “for the foreseeable future”, according to Guzman. That is pretty much all we can expect of NVIDIA to do, and it is good that they’re still up to the task.
SOURCE: @ManuelGuzman