-Battery life is 2.5-6 hours depending on the game. This is comparable to the 3DS line: http://kotaku.com/how-does-the-new-3ds-compare-to-the-older-.... We will have to see how well it does in practice though.

-Storage: The Wii U only had a basic 8GB which is enough for most use cases except downloading games. The switch can extend with SD cards too. As games will be shipped on cards like the DS I doubt this will be an issue for the average user.

-Online: I would consider the playing with others side of this more important than the free game. Though it is a shame that the games are only for the month. This is a fairly new thing for Nintendo so I hope it improves.

-Launch: it might have a few but I expect the fact that one of them is Zelda will help it a lot.

Personally I'm excited for it and it is perfect for my kind of gaming: mostly on the go. I'm rarely at home long enough to make the investment into systems that I can't take with me. Of course, YMMV.

[1] I'm not making a judgement call on specs here, just pointing out that, of course, an older console is cheaper.

[2] The accessories though, are not cheap.

And an even more conservative tripling of storage (64GB card) only sets you back about $20: http://amzn.to/2jfrROp

But I still buy the vast majority of my games on physical media, mainly because that's the only way to get a good discount. Until there's the option to be price-competitive via 3rd-party sellers, I'm not buying into any on-device game store at all.

The built in screen is fairly low resolution so there are potentially fewer pixels to push when the Switch is undocked. It remains to be seen exactly how quality/performance will be affected by undocking.

And its pretty much priced as a PS4 PRO, with 1 tb storage.

The games are on cartridges.. what year is this?

Assuming you are referencing optical media: A year in which optical media is actually having a hard time keeping up with cartridges in capacity and size and gets blown away on random read speed. (Possibly raw read speed too, depending on the specs.)

In the PS1/PS2 era, the optical media advantage in size and price per MB was clear. In the PS3 era it was possibly less clear, but still advantage optical media. But that advantage is largely gone now. The only advantage optical media has now is that it is still cheaper to make per MB (or GB if you prefer now), but carts have gotten cheap enough that that isn't necessarily a killer anymore.

Plus as I understand it, very few games even now fill a DVD, let alone fill a Bluray. And the optical media have some very significant disadvantages that are getting worse and worse relative to the rest of the hardware over time, particularly random read latency. Even the PS3 era required a lot of hacking under a lot of game's hoods to arrange the exact order things appeared on the disk to be able to stream in at anything like a reasonable speed, which is why this generation just straight-up requires you to install it to a hard drive (at least sometimes, I don't know if it's every game)... and even the hard drives they can afford to put in consoles at scale are starting to become performance bottlenecks themselves!

Optical media also means you aren't portable, which is a bit of a downer for the Switch.

Assuming you mean "why include anything at all and just let people download to local flash", I imagine it's because Nintendo still wants to sell to people who may not have internet connections that casually download 5GBs. Also, cartridge ROMs are a lot cheaper than flashable media, which is still expensive relative to the size of modern games to put in a console. I've got 512GB of very nice flash in my laptop, but that part alone cost more than the entire Switch. I imagine hitting their price points with enough flash to make it so that you're not constantly deciding which 5 AAA games you can fit on there would be quite difficult. Plus if they do ship out a game console in which the games are constantly "thrashing", Nintendo will actually pay for all the additional downloading that will result. And the end-user result is poor; "hey thanks for inviting us over but three of us need to agonize over which games to delete and then three of use will use your network connection to re-download Splatoon 2, oh dear, look at that, it's gonna take 5 hours" is not what they are looking for.

SD cards are not a perfect answer either; quality varies greatly. I can see why the 3DS has gotten away with it even as a putatively AAA console might not want to trust it entirely. It would help if people didn't buy the cheapest thing they could find with the capacity they want, but they do.

Err, the PSP would disagree with you. So would a whole generation of portable CD players.

I agree that SD is a better choice, or even the current gen of DS carts, but optical is not necessarily a killer.

And the battery power issues have relatively gotten more acute since then, as have the performance issues. It's less viable now than it was then, and it's debatable whether it was a good idea then.

On average, yes, but that's because "indie" and mobile games are quite small. An average big budget Activision/EA/Ubisoft game has been Bluray sized for years.

http://www.game-debate.com/news/14795/average-game-download-...

Whoah, can you source that? If that number is even remotely true the thing is completely useless as a handheld due to requiring 2-3 extra batteries for any longish trip.

Nintendo having an history of using proprietary cable, this is great news. Having the possibility to charge all of your device with one cable and sharing a unique powerbank is something really cool.

On the other hand, I think it could be a nice touch to give the customer an option to buy a case/battery combo, designed by the same manufacturer.

Likewise if it wasn't built in but came with the product, i'd be wanting a lower priced product not including the external battery.

> Battery life can last for more than six hours, but will vary depending on the software and usage conditions.

> For example, The Legend of Zelda™: Breath of the Wild can be played for roughly 3 hours on a single charge.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/27/you-wont-be-able-to-upgr...

Battery life is on par with portable gaming devices currently so I am not sure if your expectations are a bit unrealistic. That said, it's 2.5 - 6 hours depending on the game. Something like Pokemon on the go might be a lot longer than 2.5 hours for something like Legend of Zelda.

Storage is probably ok. First, it's a cartridge based system so I don't expect game installs to take as much space as something like the PS4. Moreover, as others have pointed out, you can expand it by adding an SD card fairly cheaply...which is more than can be said for most consoles currently.

Online offering is pretty weak and I am disappointed that the industry has now made it "normal" for users to pay for online play in the console world...but oh well. On the other hand, local multiplayer and up to 8 device LANs is awesome!

Titles at launch are limited...but to be honest Zelda at launch will probably be enough to carry them through.

Regarding your killers, consider that the Switch has a USB-C connector so it may be possible to charge it on the go with a portable battery (perhaps even during use). That is huge when compared against the limitations of most gaming laptops (I am not familiar with other gaming portables though). Price is price, but I would focus more on the accessory costs than the console cost itself.

You can see the internals of the K1 here: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nvidia+Shield+Tablet+Battery+Re...

The X1 Shield tablet's FCC filing show it also has a 5200mah battery so I'm guessing the layout is similar to the K1 and the Switch (the Switch filing just says the battery is non-removable).

Whatever the design, I hope it's better than Nintendo's previous handhelds which had a lot of blank circuit board where there could have been more battery volume: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nintendo+3DS+XL+Motherboard+Rep...

It should be noted that both Microsoft and Sony recoup some loss leading with their subscription services.

Besides, this seems fairly on par with other portable gaming devices currently.

The flights that didn't have USB outlets were shorter anyway, so the battery would hold.

On every international flight I've taken, there has been USB power but zero power outlets in coach.