After what feels like an eternity of rumour milling and speculating, Nintendo's finally caved and given the world what it wants: an official view of its upcoming Switch 2 handheld console, which it says is coming in 2025—no specific release date, unfortunately, just this year.
It's done so a little on the sly, too, springing it on the world via a trailer on its YouTube channel. What we see in this reveal is a larger, more stately handheld that looks, dare I say it, a little like a handheld gaming PC.
That's thanks to its all-black design. A bold move—but not spit-in-your-face bold, considering the handheld gaming PC market is now veritably massive. It also flies in the face of some previous rumours, such as a 360-degree render of a case for the new console with presumably a traditionally red-and-blue Switch 2 inside.
Nope. All black, baby. Just the way we like it—just ask the Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and, er, well, we'll leave the ROG Ally aside for now.
And bigger, too. The original Switch, for reference, had a 6.2-inch screen. But we're used to that 7-inch goodness here in handheld PC land, or even bigger in some cases. And with great size comes great responsibility to keep upright, which is why the Switch 2 will have a kickstand to rest it wherever you please—that's a feature I've personally loved on the Legion Go, and I'm happy to see another handheld take its benefit seriously.
The original Switch also had a kickstand, of course, though a largely rubbish one off to one side. The Switch OLED's was much better.
In addition to all this, the Switch 2 looks to have a smattering of other goodies that are the remit only of larger devices, such as USB-C and 3.5 mm ports. Lovely stuff.
And don't worry, it still comes with detachable controllers like the original, although these are bigger to fit alongside the new upsized screen. And those controllers—hang on, did they just start skating around across the surface? Yep, that's right, it looks like the Joy-Cons will be getting a mouse mode akin to the Lenovo Legion Go's "FPS mode".
Nintendo also confirms backwards compatibility for physical and digital Switch games, so no worries on that front, either.
No official news on what hardware will be powering this handheld—nor how much it will cost, unfortunately—but rumours have remained pretty steadfast that we'll be seeing a Tegra T239 chip inside the Switch 2. A recent seeming Switch 2 prototype PCB leak hints at as much, and if so, we'll be looking at an 8-core Arm Cortex-based chip (1x HP-core, 3x A78 P-cores, and 4x A55 E-cores) alongside a predominantly Ampere (Nvidia 30-series) architecture GPU, albeit with some Ada Lovelace (40-series) elements.
The original Switch had 256 Maxwell-based (900-series) CUDA cores in the GPU, while the T239 has 1,536 of the newer architecture CUDA cores. Lovely stuff indeed. If that's what we're dealing with, it should be more than enough juice for what looks to me like more of a handheld gaming PC than a console.
What can I say? You can thank the handheld PC market for this inspo later, console gamers.*
*Kidding, of course. I know we have the original Switch to thank for our precious handhelds.
