NVIDIA is leaving the Smartphone and Tablet market in search of greener pastures!

NVIDIA is moving on from the market to focus its efforts elsewhere after their Tegra 4i failed to catch on in the main-stream market, admitted CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in an interview with CNET. Huang said that they have realized that the company would rather spend time in adding value to certain areas of the tech world, like in cars or gaming specific devices, set top boxes and even televisions.

But that doesn’t mean that NVIDIA is going to exit altogether, we might see a Tegra Superphone at some time as mentioned the “Porsche of tablets or phones.”

Most of the interview is cantered around the failings of the Tegra 4i, a slimmed down variant of the Tegra 4 that finally included 4G LTE and was supposed to be a game-changer in the mainstream entry-level smartphone market, which ultimately didn’t happen thanks to Qualcomm, who make similar chips that are more affordable. Also mentioned are MediaTek, an up and coming chipset maker that has somewhat been successful in its attempts to undercut Qualcomm to cater the market.

No worries though as NVIDIA isn’t leaving the mobile platform altogether and it will continue to invest in SHIELD as a platform. NVIDIA is also trying to enter and dominate the Set-top box marker, the smart TV market, and cars, something their CEO loves on a ‘deep, personal level.’ We should see a new SHIELD device in the near future.

It’s going to be a long time till the next magical Tegra phone comes, unless a partner comes to NVIDIA to build the ultimate gaming phone or tablet where the company can add value, like Xiaomi has tried with their slate, just not in current plans. 

So people what are your thoughts on NVIDIA exiting the smartphone and tablet game. Though we won’t miss them since we haven’t seen much of Tegra Chips in recent times.