NVIDIA's Shield 2 prototype shows up in a Canadian pawn shop

Back in 2013, NVIDIA released the Shield, a handheld gaming unit that looked like a heftier Xbox controller paired with a fold-up screen. Powered by the company's then-current Tegra 4 chips, it ran on Android as a small powerhouse. The company renamed it the Shield Portable but never followed up with another officially-released handheld, instead moving on to a pair of tablet gaming machines. But a supposed prototype for the next version of the NVIDIA Shield Portable somehow wound up in a Canadian pawnshop.

Redditor FwrigginRwootbeer posted their find to the NVIDIA subreddit about a suspiciously different version of the Shield Portable. Android Police independently confirmed that the unit in question was a test kit for game developers to tinker with and was never intended to reach the public. As the site points out, FwrigginRwootbeer's photos of the model match pics in documents filed to the FCC last year which described a second Shield Portable device that has yet to get publicly released -- if it ever will.

The Redditor included photos of the device's specs, which also align with those included in the documents. The dev unit has an ARM Cortex-A57 CPU at 1.91 GHz (which matches Tegra's X1 chip), 3GB of RAM and a 5.9-inch, 1440 x 810 pixel resolution screen. It's very unlikely that we'll ever see a finished version of a second Shield Portable released to consumers, though NVIDIA is keeping the brand name alive with its Shield TV line.