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Laura Dale Says Nintendo Switch Battery Is 3 Hours Max, Dock Does Improve Performance, And It Has Touchscreen

Journalist Laura Dale who has given reliable information in the past about the Nintendo Switch has revealed a few new details. These haven’t been confirmed by Nintendo, but with the company keeping quiet on the system until the end of the year its the best we have got. She says that the maximum battery life for the handheld console is three hours at the maximum which is sure to be a concern for some people. She says that despite what Nintendo told IGN the Dock does improve system performance and that the screen is touch enabled.

SourceVia

137 thoughts on “Laura Dale Says Nintendo Switch Battery Is 3 Hours Max, Dock Does Improve Performance, And It Has Touchscreen”

      1. It really wouldn’t be any different in the final version. This is thing was never expected to have good battery life.

      2. Having a low cost console (as Nintendo has always done compared to its competitors) defeats the purpose when you have to upgrade everything. On the Wii U it was wiimotes, plus nunchucks, plus pro controllers, plus GC adaptor, plus external hard drive, plus y cable so hard drive could draw enough power, plus rechargeable batteries/battery packs, plus recharging station, plus battery for gamepad… I feel like I’m forgetting something there but geez that’s a lot of money. And the fact it is a giant mess of cables and accessories. PS3/4 is controllers… :l now that I think about it Nintendo’s home consoles are MORE expensive because they dump the cost of 3rd party stuff on the consumer. For shame.

          1. i have GAME uk wii charger and its still going strong from 2006 its still compatable with my wiiu multi charger witch houses one pro pad one gamepad and two wii remotes ALSO FROM GAME

        1. I used to use Nyko things, then I realized how cheap they all are. Instead I bought a Wiimote dock from Energizer and it works great

    1. Upgrade battery how? How long do you expect to be able to take games like Skyrim and Breath Of The Wild for? That is gonna take a shitton of battery life.

        1. That’s 5 months away. How much you think it’s going to improve by then? Not to mention they need have all these consoles built and ready to go before then so that’s even less months.

  1. So Nintendo lied? Or is it simply that the dev kit will be different from the actual console…. more rumors… should have known the trailer would only cause more speculation

    1. Dev kits are always underpowered, this makes sure that early games always work. This is why something like oblivion dues not look as good as Skyrim.

      I think they lied about the dock for a few reasons 1) they arnt talking specs or power at the moment
      2) they dide t want to talk about features other then the main idea of the system.
      3) it might get updates much like ps pro, and Scorpio. So they might talk about future docks down the line that incense power.
      4) the current dock may only support 4K, and provide more ram maybe some processing.

      1. The dock isn’t going to have additional processing power. Using two GPUs barely works well on PCs. In this case they would need an insanely high bandwidth external connection to have the two communicate. People have to let go of the idea that the dock has additional processing power.

    2. Unfortunately I agree. Launching a trailer, then going totally silent… I’m not sure if it would have just been better to wait until they were ready to talk.

  2. They are marketing it as a home and portable device with the main concern being home console. I wouldn’t care if the battery life is 1 hour if I am out I am likely going to be in an area that has an outlet.

  3. I think I speak for most when I say it’ll be a shame if the battery is 3 hours maximum, though considering it being a powerful hybrid console I should be surprised. There’s even potential to change battery in the future if the back cover opens. But for now, a rumour is a rumour…….

      1. That back plate could easily come of and have room for a bigger battery like the Gamepad. With the normal battery the gamepad only gets 3-5 hrs. But some people can get the bigger one up to ten. So I wouldn’t be surprised if a bigger battery can be put in to make it 6-8hrs.

        1. Exactly. I have a battery in my game pad that lasts 6-8 hours and fits inside the compartment (no clunky brick on the back) – So hopefully we will see that. If not, I will be happy if it can charge using a 2amp external battery brick like I use on my phone and tablet.

          My laptop is a beast. It only gets MAYBE 4 hours… But I did that on purpose. I wanted power above portability. Being able to travel is convenient, but I wanted full video render ability as a priority.

          If the NS portable unit can play full-console games, It’s OK IMO if the battery can only handle 3 hrs untethered from an external supply. I just hope the unit is expandable with SD cards and charges using a common USB port, NOT like the game pad, that requires that power cord and brick with the Nintendo-specific port.

  4. This rumor makes no sense. Unless the touch screen is for UI use only, you can’t have touch screen enabled sections in games, as it’s possible to play the game with the screen stuck in the dock.

    Like before, I’ll trust data from Nintendo and Nintendo only. For months I’ve listened to this site and others bang on that it was going to be running on an AMD chipset, and the console would not be a hybrid, but would be a line of systems all using the same OS. That didn’t happen.

    Lastly, if the rumor is true about 3 hours, that pegs it better than the 1-2 hours people were expecting for what amounts to a pencil thin portable PS4. I’m ok with that.

    1. I’m not sure where that AMD shit came from. But Nintendo them self’s said NX was a line of devices.

      And with Nintendo also saying the NS is not a replacement for 3DS, or Wii U. We may see yet another device focused on replacing those.

    2. Incase you didn’t know Nintendo is now making mobile apps so a touch screen does make sense it also allows for a webbrowser. You don’t have to use every function in a actual game you know.

      This site posted news that it would be a hyrbid for months and months so I don’t know what your on about. You probally the same guy that told me not to believe rumors about the hybrid eventhough everyone and there mother said it would be.

    3. Actually it completely makes sense.

      Seriously: people expect touchscreens on pretty much every screen with the exception of an actual TV or projector (and I’m sure someone will try to debunk those expectations that I made). In fact, what tablet doesn’t have a touchscreen? Tablets started as touchscreen devices (that made you use a pen, but that’s beyond the point).

      If people look at it and hold it in their hand, one of the first things that they’ll do is touch the screen and expect something to happen. I went to an Apple Store the other day (yes, I know, but it was for my sister, but whatever) and I saw a couple try to touch an iMac screen. After a few tries, they ended up being disappointed and they left.

      We’ve gotten to this point where touchscreens are expected, so, based off of my experience, I can absolutely see the Switch’s screen have a touchscreen. Of course, I can always be wrong and Nintendo doesn’t have a touchscreen, but if that’s the case, then honestly (again, based off of experience), that is a VERY bad mistake for Nintendo to make, especially since every other tablet-like screen is touch-enabled, including the Wii U GamePad.

      In any case, grabbing a Salt Shaker Machine is still the safest approach to make.

        1. The fact that it uses a Tegra based SoC and is a portable:
          – Tegra X1 is around 300+ GFLOPS (sp)
          – Tegra “X2” can be around 70% faster than that (assuming X1 28nm and X2 16nm, if X1 is on a smaller node, then less) at the same power consumption, which means 510+ GFLOPS.
          – There isn’t much extra in a Tegra SoC (no modems, etc.) which could be replaced for extra performance
          – Tegra X1 already throttles due to power consumption / heat in regular gaming sessions unless actively cooled.
          – If a custom Tegra SoC is larger (more powerful but consumes more power), it can only be a little larger due to thermal and battery constraints
          – The above 2 limitations lead me to believe that a custom SoC won’t be more than 15% faster than a “base X2”, ~585+ GFLOPS
          – PS4 does around 1800 GFLOPS (sp)
          – the Tegra SoC might heavily overclock when docked, which could put it around 700 GFLOPS

          1. Having my numbers reprimanded / corrected, it seems the original X1 has around 500 GFLOPS of performance already, and the X2 could have about 750 GFLOPS of performance No idea about the power consumption at that level (X1 was 10W, which would eat 10Ah battery in ~3.5h, assuming no other components use power and the chip is fully taxed). So 1/3rd – 1/2 the power of PS4 is likely when docked.

                1. You mean 1 tflop “double” precision right? Is there any reason the X1 would be restricted from operating at double precision? It does have a 64 bit CPU.

                  If I’m not mistaken, the PS4 operates on a 64 bit system and runs at 1.8 TFLOPS. Doesn’t that mean it gets 1.8 TFLOPS from a double-precision format? Unless of course PS4 games are only using 32 bits of the computer memory, in which case it’s getting 1.8 TFLOPS from a single-precision format.

                  I could be mistaken in all this. Honestly, I don’t know a whole lot about this stuff.

                  1. No, I mean HALF precision, as in 16 bits, and seeing how the processing happens in the graphics cores, the CPU make absolutely no difference in the conversation.

                    Half precision is great for machine learning, but games use mostly single precision values (which is also why that is what is usually reported), and even those are quite restrictive.

                    1. Sorry. Like I said I don’t know a whole lot about this stuff. I was confusing CPU with GPU. I had to do some quick research, but I found this online.

                      “In computing, half precision is a binary floating-point computer number format that occupies 16 bits (two bytes in modern computers) in computer memory.”

                      If half-precision occupies less computer memory and performs at about twice as many FLOPS as single-precision, is there any reason half-precision can’t be utilized or is less preferable than single-precision?

                    2. @RidleySlayer

                      16 bits is simple not enough bits for enough accuracy on most tasks, and any computation with them would quickly degenerate to such imprecision that it’s noticeable. 60 fps means ~16.67ms, or ~0.01667 seconds, in 32bit that’s roughly what you would get, with 16 bits you would get 0.01660. It seems like small change, but it has a huge cumulative effect.

                    3. Half precision just doesn’t offer enough.. precision. 60fps would mean ~16.67ms per frame, or ~0.01667. With 32 bits values that can be represented quite well (and actually with even more precision), with 16 bits it degenerates to 0.01660, which may not seem like a huge difference, but it does have huge cumulative effects.

                      A more concrete example: since precision is so limited, if the game world / level, is 100 units long, then character would not be able to move less than 0.1 units at a time (unit can be, for example, character size), so when animating the characters hand, the hand would need to move 0.1 character length each frame. In BotW Links hands seem to animate appr. 0.5-1 character lengths per second, or 0.008 – 0.016 units per frame, that’s an order of magnitude difference, and would result in very choppy animation.

                      And the problem gets worse and worse the bigger the level / world.

                      You can read more here: http://floating-point-gui.de/basic/ and http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertWooden/20150413/240938/Overcoming_Floating_Point_Precision_Errors.php

          2. The Tegra X1 has 1.1 Tera flops of performance power at under 11 watts. Not sure where you got your info but I got mine right off of the Tegra x1 ces presentation from Nvidia. So even if the Switch uses Tegra x1 it is still pretty strong and it’s actually rumored to be using the x2. Either way we won’t know for sure until Nintendo announces these specs.

  5. As long as there’s a portable charger I’m good. It does beg the question though of if you really can use it fully on a plane.

  6. It’s good that the dock improves performance and I’m glad it has a touch screen. It’s sounding more similar to a standard tablet. A 3 hour battery life won’t be well received though. I’m reminded of the Sega Game Gear. The tech was vastly superior to the Game Boy, but the fact that it burned through at least 18 batteries in the minimum amount of time it took Game Boy to burn through 4 caused it to fail. I won’t believe this just yet. Nintendo told Famitsu that they’re aiming to allow Switch to be conveniently played at places without electricity connection. I’m hoping for a better battery performance.

    1. More like the Nomad. That sucker was a full-power, colored, portable Sega system. Playing console cartridges. It had a 1.5-2hr battery life, but it kicked ass while it had juice.

      It reminds me of Evangelion. The Eva units were powerhouses, but once they untethered, they only had 5 min of portable power. XD

  7. Makes sense. And it´s ok for me! After all, most of the rumours became true. Come on March 2017, come to me ! hehehe

    1. of course the trailer produced more rumors. Nintendo basically told us nothing. Why can’t they just explain their system and tell us why they think it’s worth whatever price they are going to be charging us? No, they can’t do that because they’re not confident in their system so they have to play these tricks and starve the community of information and force speculation. Notice that Xbox and PS4 didn’t do this with the Scorpio or the Pro and I’m thinking they’ll both end up selling many more units than the Switch

  8. Ok. Thanks for the information. I also want to know if we still have that optional double screen feature like Wii U does. Some people may have gotted used to that feature.

    1. Doesn’t look like it will have two screens. Too bad because it’s a great feature in some games. I suspect it would have been great with Metroid. Even if the second screen isn’t the controller it would have been nice. The main problem with the game pad is it was forced for every game even when it didn’t really make sense or improve the experience at all. Xenoblade used it great though, so did Wind Waker and Pikmin. Even the W101 did it well.

  9. 3 hours is actually fine in my opinion.
    Although I think to satisfy more people, they’d have to aim for the 5-6 hour range.
    I’m easier to please when it comes to battery life, seeing as I wouldn’t as often play it on the go for extended periods.
    But I remember people taking issue with the original 3DS battery life, so there’s that.

  10. No surprise here, if a small device can reproduce crystal clear HD visuals it is natural it consumes a lot of battery.

    Hopefully there will be an official portable battery/power bank just like Apple for travellers.

  11. Didn’t Nintendo just say in an interview that the battery life isn’t confirmed or finished yet, and that they’re still working on it? I don’t think I’d trust discount Emily Rogers on this one.

  12. I also think 3-4 hours is fine, given it has near-console performance. There will likely be 3rd party extended batteries also.

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  14. Hopefully it actually has a longer battery life than that because that was a problem with the Wii U gamepad. And/or hopefully the gamepad can be charged using common USB charging cables with plug adaptors.

  15. I’m sorry Nintendo, IF that’s true; your going to get a lot of angry people at the beginning. If your showing that the console is portable and one of the main focus is that in the trailer, you CAN’T have a 3 hours battery. IF you travel a lot by plane or car, you’ll know you need more time. The least you can give us is 10 hours. That is the most revolutionary thing you should investigate before creating a portable console.; if you really wanted a “tablet-device”, you’ll need a lot of power to play.

    I am praying that this is false.

    1. 10 hours? That’s quite a stretch. I think the least people expect from this thing is a 5 hour charge like the 3DS. I want the Switch very much, but if 3 hours is the final battery life, I will probably not buy one until they sell one with an improved battery life.

      1. How much time a good tablet could have?
        For what i know, i’ve seen tablets reach the 8hour mark and maybe more.
        What makes me a little.. sceptical about that NS tablet, is they can use only the neccesary for gameplay, i mean they will only hardware they’ll need to create a game on-the-go experience, that’s why i think they didn’t show is this tablet it’s at least touch-based.
        All those “features” you’ll see in the tablets today i don’t think will be in NS-Tablet, they will save battery juice taking out a lot of those features.

        Maybe this is a simple tablet, touch screen, browser like, and that’s all. Don’t expect more if you want a 3hours battery… until Nintendo reveal some crazy new battery that nobody has and ways to optimize it.

    2. There is no fucking way we are getting 10 hours, and respectfully, I feel like it’s unreasonable to expect it. Only Tablets come anywhere close to that, and yes, we are all using the word “tablet,” but this is a portable home console. If we can get console power out of it, we have to set reasonable expectations.

      I’m not saying people who complain if it’s only 3hours are stupid or unjustified, I would think 4-5 hours would be perfect, but what we all want is a console that can play 3rd party games. Taking it on the go is a damn-amazing feature, but it is not the first priority. For the Switch, we really need power first, then whatever can be done to make it portable second.

  16. As someone who will be using this primarily as a handheld, this is FAR too low. I feel like the final product will last at least five hours though. This number of “3 hours” is a bit ridiculous, and I feel like this is most likely a number coming from the devkits and not the final product.

    1. well the thing is that Nintendo marketing the NX as a portable home console hence 3 hours battery time. So for once they are logic with the marketing I won’t bash them for it. And they clearly want the new 3DS to be successful for at least 3 more years.

    2. Well, try to remember, this is a home console, not a 3DS replacement. Also, batteries were made for the game pad that tripled it’s life. I also plan on using it mostly as a portable myself(when I get one) we’ll have to see.

      1. They say it is a home console first, but they are effectively killing their ability to release a handheld console here. If this thing already does handheld gaming–and arguably better than a traditional handheld, then there is just no room. So, this is effectively also going to be our handheld as well, whether Nintendo is ready to admit it or not.

  17. Let’s hope that this is wrong. I hope that the battery, at the very least, will be three times longer lasting. In this way, I would actually be against Li-Ion Batteries, and would better settle for Ni-MH.

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  19. I was very surprise by the statement Nintendo issued about the NX being a Non touch screen. They have been crazy about it since the NDS through the Wii U and I read when it was presented (I don’t remember which language but it was not in English) it has a capacitive multi-touch screen (up to 10).

    As for the functionality of the screen, it will be be very easy to disable the screen when the main unit detect when it is attached to the dock station. My hope is they using OLED screen instead of LED.

    I also believe the NX will have a control (sole separately) which will be able to project a 3D image (remember the patent we saw in the summer), and will act as an off TV thing. But that just my own opinion based on the patent.

    Now as for the 3 hours battery I found it normal and would not expect more to be honest (if you want to play modern game). Again the worrying thing is the battery will have to be replace eventually unless Nintendo has thought about the battery management and use charging modern technique when the unit is connected to the dock.

    Speaking about the dock I really hope Nintendo will use the Dock as a second graphic card which will then use the SLi technology to boost the performance of the game when connected to it. since I talking about the dock station, 2x USB 2.0 and 1 USB 3.0…. OK Now I see they are thinking about external storage and since the NX has 32 GB of storage built-in… one can easily understand where I going with it.

    Furthermore I hope All SD card will have room to add any DLC those games may have when you are on the go. Cause if that’s not the case then it will be a bummer.

  20. I’m able to get a good five to six hours out of my Surface playing things like Unreal 2016 or Portal 2 before I have to charge them, so if a freaking dedicated games machine can’t get at least 5, I’ll be disappointed.

    1. Yeah, they better use USB 3.0. Preferably not micro
      Also I want to know what kind of connector is there is for dock.
      But it is good if they use USB 3.0 on the base, that will allow taking advantage of faster drives.

  21. Well, I was not expecting wonders with current technology.
    But they are coming with way to almost double the battery capacity and shorten recharge time, perhaps there will be Switch version of that.

  22. I mean the handheld being able to play those games seems like it would be a huge drain on battery life, but even so 3 hours seems a just bit too short. Hopefully by release they can bump that number up a bit. Also expecting 30fps on handheld vs 60fps docked.

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  24. I think it’s funny how people don’t care about the switch battery life but everyone hates the Wii U’s battery life.

    1. I have no problem with Wii U battery life, still have the original in it. And the charging port on the gamepad is not working that well because my son drooled in it and I have to use the dock to charge it.
      For Switch I’d expect to buy improved battery asap.

  25. People if this console based on x1 it would be as powerful as an Xbox one , let alone an x2 parker which is way more powerfull and far more efficient since its running on a smaller processor size or node. BTW the CPU is definetly more powerful than ps4 , ps4 is based on jaguar CPU (go google that) and its becoming very very old and not efficient, while the NS is based on a much newer extremely efficient CPU. Let’s now take the GPU , its much more advanced interm of features APIs and overall efficiency and at the level this console specs are being rumored , I can bravly say that it can handle anything

  26. Three hour battery life is really unacceptable, especially after the Wii U’s poor battery life. They can’t afford to make a mistake like that. I don’t know if they intend to kill off the 3DS and handhelds in general with this but if they are they need longer than 3 hour battery life.

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  28. For a system that is both a home console and a portable, 3 hours is not that bad. 5 hours would be much better and of course anything more than that would be great. The thing is, this a portable AND a home console in one so unless you guys want to be paying over $500 for this, I would be careful what you ask for. As a combo system 3 hours is perfectly acceptable to me as it isn’t meant to be played ONLY as a portable gaming system. If it was then it would not have the power that it seems to have. Either way we just need to wait for official specs from Nintendo or a highly reputable source until we can make any solid conclusions.

  29. @RidleySlayer

    Half precision just doesn’t offer enough.. precision. 60fps would mean ~16.67ms per frame, or ~0.01667. With 32 bits values that can be represented quite well (and actually with even more precision), with 16 bits it degenerates to 0.01660, which may not seem like a huge difference, but it does have huge cumulative effects.

    A more concrete example: since precision is so limited, if the game world / level, is 100 units long, then character would not be able to move less than 0.1 units at a time (unit can be, for example, character size), so when animating the characters hand, the hand would need to move 0.1 character length each frame. In BotW Links hands seem to animate appr. 0.5-1 character lengths per second, or 0.008 – 0.016 units per frame, that’s an order of magnitude difference, and would result in very choppy animation.

    And the problem gets worse and worse the bigger the level / world.

    You can read more here: http://floating-point-gui.de/basic/ and http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertWooden/20150413/240938/Overcoming_Floating_Point_Precision_Errors.php

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  32. While I hope the 3 hour battery life isn’t true, I do hope the dock does boost the Switch’s power. If it doesn’t, that handheld must be one fucking powerful son of a bitch & it would ultimately explain the horrible battery life. Imagine a PS4 being portable. I’d give the battery life on that sucker 3 hours tops. Hell! Maybe less! @.@

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