NVIDIA being NVIDIA, when they announced that they were going to get into mobile chip business, they also announced something called “TegraZone”. In a nutshell, it’s a third party app store that only has games that are optimized for Tegra hardware. Unfortunately, when it comes to mobile phone and tablet chips, NVIDIA’s market share is frighteningly small. Besides the 2012 Nexus 7 and the HTC One X, I honestly can’t think of any Tegra powered devices worth buying.
After realizing that TegraZone is essentially useless, NVIDIA has announced that they’re going to make it compatible with everything. To be specific, any Android device running Android 2.2 or higher. How well will the games in TegraZone, which were optimized to run on NVIDIA’s graphics processor, run on a phone with a Qualcomm chip or a Samsung Exynos chip? That remains to be seen.
Now I don’t want to sound too negative, because NVIDIA definitely tried to be different by launching a store squarely aimed at gamers. We all know how bad today’s app stores are at curation, because let’s face it, finding one good app in a see of over a million apps is difficult. TegraZone succeeds in that regard, it’s a place you can visit and find high quality games, but that should be Google’s job, no?
As for what the future of TegraZone has in store, NVIDIA isn’t saying much, but I’d be shocked if any of us even remember it exists by this time next year.
Remember Shield?