Have a peep at the alleged Nvidia Shield tablet

Nvidia already confirmed it's hard at work on a brand new gaming device, so it's no surprise that the rumor mill is spinning up.

The latest development in the saga of the alleged Nvidia Shield tablet - a slate-shaped successor to the Nvidia Shield gaming handheld - is the PGEgaHJlZj0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy5ob3N0aW5na2l0YS5jb20NIiB0YXJnZXQ9Il9ibGFuayIgcmVsPSJub2ZvbGxvdyI+cGhvdG8gPC9hPg==you see below.

The image comes by way of Evleaks, which at this point requires no introduction as the source of countless legitimate leaks.

The alleged snapshot of the rumored tablet was accompanied by a brief caption that leaves no room for ambiguity: "NVIDIA Shield Tablet, 2014."

The alleged Nvidia Shield tablet, folks (credit: Evleaks)

One-stop slate

The Nvidia Shield tablet is thought to be an Android tablet running Nvidia's powerful Tegra K1 chip, with a focus on gaming and the ability to stream PC games from computers with recent Nvidia GPUs.

The original leak from May came in the form of a benchmark that pegged an unknown Nvidia tablet with a 7.9-inch 2048 x 1536 display and the 2.1GHz quad-core Tegra K1.

More recently, Nvidia confirmed it has a new gaming device in the works, and sources said it would take on Valve's Steam Machines, like the Alienware Alpha, directly. That report may or may not have referred to the Shield tablet, but let's assume for the sake of speculation that it did.

This means a focus on gaming in the living room, and the Shield tablet's rumored specs seem to support that. Like the original Shield, the new tablet is rumored to be packing HDMI-out capabilities. However unlike the first Shield, the Shield tablet's controller will supposedly be sold separately.

Could the Nvidia Shield tablet be a one-stop slate for Android touch screen gaming, portable PC gaming, and living-room gaming with a controller in hand? Hopefully Nvidia breaks the silence soon and lets us know.

• Valve Steam Machines delayed till 2015

Kindle Unlimited looks a lot like Netflix for ebooks

Read a lot of ebooks? Amazon customers may soon have access to more than 600,000 titles for a monthly subscription fee, a deal that could be right up your alley.

GigaOM reported that Amazon may be planning to become the Netflix of ebooks as revealed by mistakenly leaked product pages advertising a new subscription service called Kindle Unlimited.

The pages in question were first spotted by publishers and readers on the Kindle Boards early Wednesday, although most of that evidence vanished from Amazon's website as quickly as it first appeared.

Thankfully, Google has come to the rescue, allowing those cached pages to be called up from the great beyond for further scrutiny ahead of Amazon officially launching the all-you-can-eat ebook subscription service.

Freedom to explore

One such screenshot touts "unlimited access to over 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks on any device for just $9.99 a month," which sounds a lot like what competing ebook subscription services Scribd and Oyster already offer. The price in straight conversions comes out to about £6 and AU$11.

For the moment, available Kindle Unlimited content appears to be flush with titles already available through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which allows Amazon Prime subscribers who also own one of the company's tablets to "borrow" one ebook free each month.

Conspicuously absent from the test pages, however, are major publishers like Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins, both of whom already offer titles to Amazon's subscription-based competitors.

One web page entitled "KU Test," which is still live at the time of this writing, displays a total of 638,416 available ebook titles, plus another 7,351 Whispersync for Voice-enabled audiobooks, which could offer Amazon a competitive edge over rivals.

• Check out our review of Amazon's Fire TV while you're here!