Nvidia Adds Touch Emulator to Shield

Nvidia Corp. upgraded its Shield portable gaming device to Android 4.3 today, according to many online reports. Meanwhile, my Droid Charge is stuck at Android 2.3. Sigh.

The biggest benefit from the upgrade, according to The Verge, is the fact that Shield users now get a feature called “Gamepad Mapper” which allows the console controller-like controls of the Shield to work like touch does on a touchscreen device. So all your favorite versions of Angry Birds can now be played on the Shield (I assume — I don’t know for sure that Angry Birds is available for the device). The Verge describes Gamepad Mapper like so:

Gamepad Mapper is a new piece of software that lets you map any of the handheld’s controls to touchscreen functions instead, allowing you to manipulate virtual joysticks and buttons and even perform touchscreen gestures with the physical gamepad by dragging widgets into place. You can set individual profiles for each and every Android app and game. Better still, you might not need to create those profiles from scratch: If another player has already shared a set of readymade controls to the cloud, Nvidia will automatically download it to your Shield as well.

It is not an entirely smooth process, as the site describes later on in an attempt to make Minecraft work. Read the whole write-up on The Verge.