Utnayan posted:

I can see his point. It's a loving standard. Just something else these bozos tried to cheap out on because they want to make money on the hardware and not the install base of software licensing.

Utnayan posted:

Bullshit if you want good sound quality in your shows and movies with Lossless/DTS MA/Dolby Atmos. Digital (Unless ripped, which a fraction of users actually know how to do anyway) sacfrices sound fidelity to the stone age. Physical media will always trump this.

Cojawfee posted:

Please tell me where a DVD drive would go on a portable game machine.

Utnayan posted:

The Switch is a home console and portable when it wants/needs to be, and a poor portable as it stands anyway given battery life and physical bulk.

Am I missing something?

katkillad2 posted:

All this launch needed was one more great game, I would have had a completely different reaction if Mario was ready for launch or even the rumored Pikmin game they are supposedly sitting on.

katkillad2 posted:

All this launch needed was one more great game, I would have had a completely different reaction if Mario was ready for launch or even the rumored Pikmin game they are supposedly sitting on.

katkillad2 posted:

All this launch needed was one more great game, I would have had a completely different reaction if Mario was ready for launch or even the rumored Pikmin game they are supposedly sitting on.

Cojawfee posted:

If you take a second to actually look at it, it is a portable console that can also be put into a dock and used with a TV. Those briefcases you could buy in walmart that have a screen and you can put a playstation into is a home console that is portable when it needs to be. Everything about the Switch screams portable console. You just happen to be able to put it into a dock and play with a normal controller.

Dr Cheeto posted:

DVD is a dying format and most of the market already has at least one way to play a DVD, if not more. Blu-ray a different story but it's also rather expensive especially if you're not actually using it for your games. One would not really move units and the other would be too costly for what is a completely superfluous add-on. Frankly it's nuts that you'd expect either of those things on a cartridge system.

Cojawfee posted:

Please tell me where a DVD drive would go on a portable game machine.

Jonas Albrecht posted:

Really though, I think ARMS is gonna be well received.

Utnayan posted:

Not sure where you are going with that. I agree with DVD. But Blu-Ray is cheap as gently caress to print and reproduce. Carts and Solid State are more expensive.

Utnayan posted:

Except every customer reaction, from Tokyo to that island Tom Hanks was on in Cast Away, are saying "This thing is too loving big what were you thinking and I get more battery life out of my E-cig."

Waltzing Along posted:

Yep. People are going to like waggle games now all of a sudden when they hated them before.

ARMS is already a huge failure. People will buy it because there is nothing else to buy. But no one will really like it.

TFRazorsaw posted:

Utnayan posted:

How much do you want to bet they come out with an external drive to play movies and accessorize the gently caress out of it?

Utnayan posted:

That's awesome. Now close the pad and carry it with you.

Wait.

Utnayan posted:

That's awesome. Now close the pad and carry it with you.

Wait.

Oh double wait. You also forgot to put on the loving side controllers. Which will also need to be stored. And kept. And not lost.

Utnayan posted:

That's awesome. Now close the pad and carry it with you.

Wait.

Oh double wait. You also forgot to put on the loving side controllers. Which will also need to be stored. And kept. And not lost.

VanillaGorilla posted:

This may be my ignorance talking, but isn't the N3DS XL also only rated at 3-5 hours of battery life under use? At least here you have the option of using USB-C battery packs, etc. I've literally never had an issue with the battery in my 3DS, though. Aside from like a super long flight - but if your flight is over like 4 hours you're probably flying in a bus with seat plugs anyway.

Not saying they couldn't have emphasized the portable nature better, just that I'm not sure the battery is a huge deal!

quote:

So come into this thread I read the OP, see the 3 hours charge time, think "that's pretty reasonable", and see that they're using a 4310 mAh battery, which is on the top end of what I would have expected. Good stuff.
And then I start reading the replies... holy hell. I know neogaf has a reputation for over-reacting to things, but this thread is just straight up nuts. Go outside, take a walk, have a breath of fresh air, and when you've calmed down you can come back and we can actually look at the facts.

You're back? Great, nice day outside, isn't it? Okay, now let's talk batteries.

Battery Size

At 4310 mAh, Switch has by far the highest-capacity battery of any gaming device ever made. Here's what's currently out there:

3DS / 2DS - 1300 mAh
New 3DS - 1400 mAh
(New) 3DS XL - 1750 mAh
PS Vita - 2200 mAh

That's about twice the capacity of PS Vita or almost three and a half times the capacity of the 3DS or 2DS.

Now, you're surely saying "but X phone or Y tablet has such-and-such a capacity, Nintendo must be able to fit more in there!", but I'm willing to be X phone and Y tablet aren't actively cooled. A typical phone or tablet these days is basically a battery with some electronics and a screen attached. For a phone the battery could account for 60-70% of the internal volume, and it can be even higher for tablets.

Nintendo doesn't have the luxury of dedicating so much internal space to batteries, because it has to fit a fan and heatsink in there, which likely occupies as much as half the space between the screen and the rear of the case. Have a look at this rear-view photo of the Switch:



The blue box I've included is pretty much the best-case-scenario for how much space Nintendo can allocate to the battery in Switch. If you look at the fan vents at the top and bottom of the unit you can see where the heatsink and fan are going to sit (and I've been pretty conservative with the red box for this, as I'm not even including the area around the third vent to the lower right). Then on the left we've got space taken up by the game card slot, microSD slot, kickstand, and likely part of the logic board (which will overlap the cooling system).

There's no space for a bigger battery. The reason I say 4310 mAh is at the top end of what I would have expected is because there's just nowhere to put anything bigger. A 4310 mAh battery is basically Nintendo squeezing as big a battery as they possibly can in there. Quote me on this, when we see teardowns in March there isn't going to be some big gap where they could have put a bigger battery. They've squeezed in as much as they can without increasing the physical size of the device.

Charging

Regarding the "Switch doesn't do quick charging" claim, let's first do some basic maths. A 4310 mAh battery, assuming a standard 3.7V, comes to 15.95 Wh. For that battery to charge from 0 to 100% in 3 hours, then at an absolute minimum, it would have to be charging at a rate of 15.95/3 = 5.3W. Standard USB 2 provides 2.5W of power, so it's physically impossible for Switch to charge so quickly without some form of "quick charging".

However, as several people have already pointed out, batteries don't charge at a flat rate from 0 to 100%, they charge more quickly for the first ~80%, and much more slowly for the final ~20%. It's quite likely that Switch's peak charging rate is anywhere from 10-15W, which is, once again, far more than a standard USB 2 charger would provide.

Finally, we have Nintendo's FCC listing for Switch last month, which gave us these little nuggets of information:



See that bit where it says that the (USB-C) AC adaptor can output DC at 15V? That, folks, means that the system uses USB Power Delivery Revision 2.0 Version 1.2 or later. Or, in layman's terms, quick charging.

So, unless Nintendo have broken both the laws of thermodynamics and some regular human laws by lying to the FCC (although I'd imagine they'd get into more trouble over the former), Switch is most definitely capable of quick charging by any definition.

Regarding the total charging time of 3 hours, this is pretty typical for a gaming device. The 3DS takes even longer at 3 and a half hours for a full charge, while the PS Vita takes 2 hours and 40 mins. And in both cases we're talking about far smaller batteries than Switch has.

People also need to keep in mind once again that li-ion batteries are much slower to charge for the last 20% or so. This is why phone manufacturers always give specs like "charges to 80% in an hour", and leave out the fact that the remaining 20% takes another hour. Anantech provides some useful charging graphs in their smartphone reviews (e.g. OnePlus 3T, Honor 8), and if you look through them you'll notice a trend that charging to 80% typically takes only half the time of charging fully to 100%. This is going to vary a little bit depending on the battery and charging tech used, but it's usually around that ratio.

Translating to Switch, what we're probably looking at is the device charging to 80% battery in 90 minutes or so. Which, for me at least, is pretty reasonable. Yeah, they probably could have got it down to 60 minutes by using a more expensive battery, more expensive power ICs and a more expensive charger, but I doubt I'll ever be in a situation where that's the difference between my Switch having a usable amount of charge or not.

TL:DR

- Switch's battery is far bigger than any other gaming device
- Switch's battery is as big as they could possibly fit in there given the active cooling
- Switch definitely uses quick charging (source: FCC & James Clerk Maxwell)
- Switch probably charges to ~80% battery in about 90 minutes

Spellman posted:

It's by far the most portable. They've trimmed down the amount of equipment I need to cart with me to bring it to a friend's house, and made it smaller. Bringing a Wii U, and a hard drive with all its cables is not fun to cart around, let alone dismantle. The corded mess is as bad as the back of most PCs.

But the Switch works alone, and all you need is the dock and a couple of cords to make it a TV game at someone's house, which will be great for big multiplayer games

Utnayan posted:

Not sure where you are going with that. I agree with DVD. But Blu-Ray is cheap as gently caress to print and reproduce. Carts and Solid State are more expensive.

Why they went cartridge anyway when they made such a poo poo design of a portable baffles me. The loving thing is so big they may as well just put an optical drive in the fucker.

MY ABACUS! posted:

What would Nintendo have to do for people to finally stop defending their decisions?