Gadgetory

- So it turns out I was wrong about something and thankfully this is one of the situations where I'm pretty happy that I was wrong about something. So last week there were a lot of rumors going around that along with the Nintendo Switch Lite, Nintendo was also working on a hardware refresh of the regular Switch, and at the time I along with a number of other people, this isn't like a load opinion, was of the thought that was going to be a very quiet hardware refresh where really no noticeable change was going to happen. They were gonna change some of the internal parts in terms of improving their production quality, but at the end of the day it was going to perform more or less the same as a regular Switch. And that's mostly still true, but Nintendo has announced one major feature about this Switch refresh that is pretty important and that is a significant boost in battery life. Ever since the Switch first came out it's done a great job of accomplishing it's original goal of being this thing that you can play in portable or at home and switch between them, it's awesome. But when it comes with a portable side, one big problem it's always has is the battery life just isn't quite where a lot of people were hoping it would be. Now Nintendo's official estimate for the original Switch's battery life is two and a half to six and a half hours. The reason for that range is how quickly it drains is based on what kind of game you're playing and how much you have the backlight on so and so forth. So something like Breath of the Wild is only gonna last about three hours. This new refreshed Switch on the other hand has an estimated battery life of four and a half to nine hours. So the minimum is almost as long as the original Switch could last at the longest, and the new maximum is almost twice as much. Again, as far as Nintendo was saying, this new refresh Switch doesn't offer any kind of performance enhancements as far as how games run. It's possible that with the redone processor we might see very tiny gains, where maybe load times will be ever so slightly less than a second faster, but it's not gonna be anything that most people are gonna notice, but all that aside, that is a significant increase to battery life, and one that is definitely worth talking about. Something worth noting is that this is still a quiet hardware refresh. There's not any kind of big announcement going on for this for store shelves. You aren't gonna go to store, see a brand new box that says hey, this is the new and improved Switch with better battery life. None of that's gonna happen. Instead this will be a quiet refresh that Nintendo is saying is going to take place sometime in the middle of August and you'll start to see these new Switches pop up and the way you're gonna be able to tell the difference is by checking the serial number of the system. If it starts with XAW that is an original style Switch with the less battery life. If it starts with XKW that will be this new refreshed Switch that again, is gonna play all the same games the same way but you're gonna be able to play for significantly longer. Alongside the news of this refresh Switch, Nintendo also announced new Joy-Con colors coming out later this year, which are actually the first new ones we've seen in quite some time. We haven't had any new designs since the regular red ones for Super Mario Odyssey back when Odyssey first came out. In total they'll be adding three new colors, which are being added across two different combo packs. The first combo pack features the neon yellow that we've already seen that came out back when Arms was first released and with that we're now getting a brand new regular blue Joy-Con. So it's not the kind of brighter cotton candy blue the neon one is, instead it's this kind of deeper dark blue. It actually looks very similar to the original Hori D-pad Joy-Con, which was a deep dark blue. Personally I really hope they released these ones in individual sets because I really like the look of that regular dark blue one. I always like the neon red and blue combo, because it reminds me of like player one, player two, but if I could do that with this dark blue and the Mario red, real nice look for me. Speaking of Joy-Cons if you want an easy and cool way to customize yours, use skins like these from today's sponsor dBrand. They come in a wide variety of colors or different special pattern options like this matte black or carbon fiber, they're totally safe to use on Joy-Cons, the Switch itself. or the dock. Check out the link down below for more info. The other bundle we'll be getting is two completely brand-new colors, which actually complete the full set of neon versions of the traditional color wheel setup. We're getting neon purple and neon orange, which I've seen a few people talk about how this is kind of reminiscent of the GameCube. The GameCube original color was of course that indigo, which is very similar to the neon purple we're seeing on those Joy-Cons and there was also later on an orange GameCube and orange GameCube controller, so that kind of evokes that feeling. Whether or not that means that Nintendo's planning for this theme to play into some GameCube related news in the future, that'd be really cool, but I'm probably just getting my hopes up for nothing. While I am a huge fan of them finally adding some more Joy-Con colors and I do like some of the specific colors they're adding I'm not a huge fan of them still going about doing this as doing two pack combos with mixed color options. I really wish they just released dual packs of the same color or just put them all out individually, but fingers crossed that's gonna be what they do down the line. Until then I'm just hoping that at least that blue one gets a singular release. Now all this is also really cool because it shows that Nintendo along with announcing the Lite has renewed their commitment to the regular Switch, but that's also starting to leave me with a few more questions regarding what exactly Nintendo thinks of the Lite and whether or not people should actually grab one. When Switch Lite was announced last week I was very much hype about it and a large reason for that is because for me, the Switch really is a portable handheld console. The option of having the ability to connect to a TV is great but it's honestly not something I use very often. So having a smaller more portable Switch that's also going to be a little sturdier because it's all one piece and has slightly better battery life sounded great. But now that we also are going to have a regular Switch with full functionality that has better battery life than either versions it kind of muddles up the whole message a little bit for me. Now to be clear, anyone who was super interested in grabbing a Switch Lite because of that smaller portability and because of the reduced price point, that still makes a lot of sense for you. If you want to get it for kids, makes a lot of sense. If you don't like having a larger system, you just want the smallest option out there, there's still a good reason to change over. But if your entire argument is just which is the better system, what is the better buy, and what's gonna get you by in portable mode, well battery life is arguably the most important thing when it comes to portability and so having a newer version of the Switch that gives you all that functionality plus better battery life, it makes it a much harder decision to make. If you already have a Switch and you were thinking of switching over the Switch Lite that can still make sense. I mean again, the only reason why you were doing that in the first place is because you want that more specialized experience. Now does that mean that you might instead want to switch over to these new Switches? That doesn't really make as much sense to me because again, you're getting the same experience overall just better battery life. I mean, money wise to me at least, it makes more sense to just take that extra additional money and put it into a battery bank. On the other hand if you don't have a Switch at all and you were debating between the two consoles, things just got a lot more complicated. It really comes down I think to what you really care about. If you want something that's extra small and extra portable and you want think this may be a little sturdier, the Lite still has some strong arguments for it, but honestly at the end of the day I think the biggest one is just that lower price point. If instead you're willing to spend the extra money, it's kind of hard for me to rationalize not getting the regular Switch as long as it is that refreshed model with that battery life. Because now it's not just an issue of oh, I can't connect to the TV. It's I can't connect to the TV, I don't have visible long use and portability, there's just a lot more trade-offs than we first thought we were going to have. I just find the timing of this really interesting because while again, I don't think this fully invalidates the Switch Lite, I think there's still a lot of good reasons for the Switch Lite to exist. I think there is an audience out there for it. This certainly muddles up the message a lot more by also saying hey yeah, the Switch Lite this cool new thing we're releasing that you should buy during the holiday season. Oh, but by the way regular Switches are still really cool and maybe you should buy that instead. It's a little all over the place right now. I'm happy it exists. I'm just curious what Nintendo's thoughts are,