nVidia Shield delayed until July

Bad news if you were hoping to get your mitts on the nVidia Shield tomorrow. The Tegra 4 powered handheld has been pushed back to July. The company cites quality issues with a third party component. They apologized to those who pre-ordered the system and promised they’d have a definitive launch date soon. Full release below.

The Shield is nVidia’s break into the portable console market. It’s powered by a 1.9ghz Tegra 4 APU, 2GB of RAM, 16GB storage, and a 5” 720p display. It can play Android games, and can also stream PC games. The device will retail for $299.

We’re grateful for all the enthusiasm that’s been expressed for SHIELD, our new portable gaming device.  And we’re eager to get it into your hands.

But we won’t do that until it’s fully up to the exacting standards that NVIDIA’s known for. And some final quality-assurance testing has just turned up a mechanical issue that we’re not happy with.

So, while we announced last week that SHIELD will go on sale this Thursday, we’ve taken the hard decision to delay shipping until next month.

The issue relates to a third-party mechanical component, and we’re working around the clock with the supplier to get it up to our expectations.

We apologize to those who have preordered SHIELDs and to all those who are waiting for them to go on sale. But we want every SHIELD to be just right.

We’ll let you know when we have an exact shipping date in July. We think it will be worth the wait.