Nintendo Switch OLED's best upgrade isn't the screen
Tech Industry
Speaker 1: I got a chance to get my hands on the new OED screen Nintendo switch. And one upgrade really stood out to me as a game changer, but it was not that OED screen.
Speaker 1: I got a chance to go to a HandsOn event with the new OED Nintendo switch. It was also a chance to play Metro dread, which is one of Nintendo's big new holiday games. And I spent about an hour with both the game and the system, and that was my first opportunity to pick [00:00:30] up and feel and look at in person, this new version of the switch. It's really the first, second and third I would call it the fourth version of the switch. There was the original, there was what we called the V two, which was ever so slightly tweaked the next year. They had better battery life and a slightly different processor. Then there was a switch light. So now we have the OED switch. And the big difference here is the body size is essentially the same. The screen, however is bigger and there's a thinner bezzle around the screen. There's less dead space. So that bigger screen, again fits in kind of the [00:01:00] same size body. And, and of course it's not a regular old L E D screen. It is an OED screen. That's the technology that's on, you know, iPhones and the best big screen TVs. Uh, basically everyone who's a serious gamer movie watcher has a big OED TV, and now you've got an O lid screen on the Nintendo switch.
Speaker 2: You are faced with overwhelming power, your highest prime. It should be simply to survive
Speaker 1: Inside. It's still basically the same switch. It's got the same, uh, Invidia, Tera [00:01:30] X, one processor. It's got the same joy con controllers on the side. It does the same seven 20 screen resolution on the internal screen and 10 80 output onto your TV. E still doesn't do 4k. And frankly, with an Ole screen, it would've been cool to have, you know, 10 80 resolution on it, but playing Metro dread on it, it certainly looked fine. But even in this very limited HandsOn opportunity, I really noticed something that stood out to me a lot more than that Ole screen. It [00:02:00] is a big improvement on one of the real weak points of that original switch design. It was the Nintendo switch kickstand on the back in the original version. It was widely VA as being a little tiny little plastic kickstand piece that would kind of pop out, but would fall over very easily or just pop out of the system completely. If you put the kickstand out and put your switch on a table and gotta control and try to, if anybody and walk by and just brushed against the table, the whole thing might fall over. It was not a great kickstand.
Speaker 1: [00:02:30] The new kickstand is completely redesigned. It runs the entire width of the system. It looks a lot like the Microsoft surface kickstand, which everybody loves is one of the best design parts of the Microsoft surface pro line. That's a big tablet that has a kickstand. Uh, it comes out, you can bend it to any angle just about, and it'll stay wherever you put it. So you can take your surface and put it on the table and make it lean down more, lean up more. And it feels very stable and very sturdy. The no Nintendo switch [00:03:00] kickstand feels pretty much the same way. I loved moving it to different angles. I could lean it back more. If I was standing over it, I, I could make it more, uh, upright, uh, more vertical and it stayed everywhere. I put it and it did not feel like the switch was gonna fall right over if you're planning on getting the new switch and you're gonna be using it in handheld mode.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, that's pretty cool because the OED screen, that's a big upgrade right there. And the kickstand also a big upgrade. I used it with joy con controllers attached, sitting on the table at a nice angle, just kind of [00:03:30] leaning over and putting my hands on it while I was playing Metro dread, which is a side scrolling 2d Metro game. Nintendo said it's the first, uh, 2d tour game, I think in 19 years. Uh, it's a lot to me that their big holiday game is a, is a 2d game, but Hey, you know what? People like it,
Speaker 1: One part about the new Ola Twitch I didn't get to check out was the new base. It's pretty much like the old base. That's the, and you slot [00:04:00] your switch into in order to connect it to your TV. But this base loses a USB port that was on it, but adds an ethernet port, which could be important if you have spotty wifi, or you just wanna do super fast downloads, or you're one of those people who actually takes an ethernet Campbell and plugs them into your game consoles to me, anyone like that is complete maniac, but you know, you do, you now, of course, all this comes at a little bit of an extra price. The OED switch is $350 versus the, uh, regular switch, which is $300. The [00:04:30] switch light is even less. You do get, of course the OED screen, uh, you get the better kickstand. You get the, uh, advanced dock and you get 64 gigs of built in storaged is versus 32 gigs, which is nice. Cuz the first thing anybody ever has to do with a switch is go out and get a microSD card and put it in to store your games on that said for $300, you can get an Oculus quest too, which also has pretty advanced displays and that has 64 gigs of storage in it. So
Speaker 1: [00:05:00] Based on my little on session with the switch, I already pre-ordered one of these and I'm feeling pretty good about that. Pre-order I still have the original basically day one switch from when that first came out. If you just bought a switch last year or six months ago, do you need to upgrade to the new one? It doesn't feel like it right now. If you're a frequent traveler and go everywhere as you switch. Okay, this seems like it upgrade. If you're somebody who keeps your switch docked all the time, always playing it on the TV, basically never take it with your handheld style. Well then obviously you don't need this, [00:05:30] this new Nintendo switch. It comes out October 8th, just in time for the start of the holiday shopping season. So stay tuned to CNET because we are gonna have a full review of the final hardware very, very soon.
