Detachable controllers are not a gimmick, and make it easy for the system to go from handheld to tabletop/TV. Can't play on a TV or a tabletop with other people with a 3ds/vita, and you have to carry around a controller for a phone. Along with that most phones are lacking in the gpu department which is why the switch can play games that most modern phones couldn't handle. Homebrew devs don't benefit from console sales, so your multiplayer point makes no sense. Multiple emulators already support multiplayer as well, so no real reason it couldn't work on switch.
And unless you buy a phone with usb c, most recent phones can't output to hdmi, and pushing to TV with wireless streaming introduces lag that makes gaming impossible. So my dock point is also valid seemshow you cant play 3ds on TV easily either.
I have had multiple controllers for my consoles for years. Great stuff. If I might be expected to bring a dock with me I can bring a couple of controllers as well if gaming is my thing, or maybe use some at the destination.
Amusingly you might be able to make that argument for the wii -- its remote could be an uncomfortable conventional controller
and a sub par light gun. That represents something of some note. Not a lot came of it, amusingly I probably saw more fun stuff done with the kinect in the end, but the potential was there and visible (or visible with a camera that could pick up IR).
I played plenty of multiplayer games going as far back as my GBA and could probably do. Such things tended to be turn based or simplistic input based (a recall a minigame on the first warioware that wanted people to stand either side of the DS for instance) but that does not mean an awful lot from where I sit, or at least if we do have to go there then why not dismiss it because I can't do a RTS with fog of war (which if I had done the 3d right I might have been able to do on the 3ds come to think of it -- same idea as those multi channel TVs or satnavs that display something else for the passenger).
Plenty of devices come with the option to plug in HDMI cables as well. Sucks that some recent ones are not capable of things (I guess, I can't verify either way right now) and lag is annoying for some game types but hardly all of them. Not to mention low latency LAN level streaming is demonstrably doable in a whole load of devices so that may well be a software limitation, or possibly feature if the delay is used to do something useful, rather than a hardware one.
I said it all a few pages back how I don't see the switch as anything like what the GBA and DS represented for their day -- we have endless more programmable devices of similar or greater power, certainly enough power to be useful. TVs support all sorts of common inputs these days (I recall 15 or so years ago going out of my way to get a laptop with svideo out, still have my box to convert VGA to TV signals that I had used in the years before as well). Such things were what gave us the GBA, DS, Wii, xbox and PSP scenes, when those were taken away by phones/tablets and said TVs gaining nice inputs and resolutions we saw the successors to those various consoles.
I want people making cool software because they can, however I am not particularly seeing the incentive for the switch. I agree entirely that android is not the best way to achieve the theoretical potential, however practically speaking it is probably going to be the main thing to do it.
Come back when your phone can play BoTW
?
I know what was meant though.
Nintendo shined up some ageing android hardware (architecture wise the switch is somewhat old news) that I dare say a lot of devices will struggle to match at very present. Give it a tiny bit of time and yeah...
Same thing was seen with the 3ds to an extent, though perhaps not as great a one as.