The Nintendo Switch isn’t a perfect piece of hardware. While the portable hybrid home-console was revolutionary in plenty of ways, it has some shortcomings that I think plenty of fans and critics alike have hoped to see addressed in hardware revisions over the years.
One complaint I’ve seen plenty of times is that the size of the screen on the Switch isn’t all too impressive. It’s plenty of real-estate for certain games, and the slightly larger OLED model’s screen does help, but big triple-A adventure games or tabletop party games certainly look a little cramped on it. The Up-Switch Orion aims to remedy that by delivering a massive handheld screen solution to dock your Switch into, but numerous design flaws prevent this from being an ideal portable upgrade for anyone.
For starters, the Up-Switch Orion aims to make the Nintendo Switch screen a bit too big – it delivers an 11.6 inch monitor for you to experience your Switch library on. That’s larger than more than a few iPads and Android tablets out there.
The base device, once you’ve taken it out of the box and gone through the weird extra steps of having to manually screw the Joy-Con grips in, is actually pretty light-weight. With your Joy-Cons inserted on the sides and your Switch tablet docked into the bay on the back of the Up-Switch Orion, though, it’s a totally different story. This behemoth is heavy as hell, and genuinely stressed my palms after just a few minutes of holding it.
This is just the beginning of my ultimate critique of the Up-Switch Orion – the hardware feels so antithetical to the promises of portability in all of the company’s official copy and promotional material. It’s only with my legs kicked up and the Orion resting on my lap, or laid up in bed with the Orion in front of me, that it becomes a comfortable gaming experience.
That scenario of laying in bed with the Orion is a tough one, though, because the device requires a constant connection to a power supply to even operate. With no built-in battery or power storage, the default expectation is to strap a portable powerbank to the back of the hardware in order to power it. Up-Switch didn’t send a portable battery pack to test this out with, so I briefly attempted strapping in the massive power bank I have for travel. Within seconds, holding the Orion became a forearm workout, so I removed the battery pack, and opted to plug the Orion into a wired USB-C charger to use it. Again, a sound solution, but another knock against this being any kind of viable tool for portable gaming or outdoor Switch experiences.
The screen itself isn’t terrible, but it also doesn’t quite come across as a premium experience. My biggest fear was that, much like the jump from 3DS to 3DS XL, the bigger screen of the Up-Switch Orion would cause game visuals and pixels to be super stretched out. This wasn’t the case at all, thankfully. Instead, the main issue with the Up-Switch Orion screen is that it just isn’t all that impressive.
For one thing it’s not a 1080p panel, but 768p (per NintendoLife), so whatever your Switch is outputting is scaled down to a resolution that is only fractionally higher than the built in Switch display. On top of that, the screen has a matte finish to it, trading the luster and deep black point of a glossy panel for reduced glare. Also, when you use the built-in volume or screen-setting buttons, some very clunky television-menu windows straight out of 2009 pop up on the screen.
Is the Up-Switch Orion a good portable accessory? Absolutely not. In so many ways it feels designed, or at least best suited, to use in the comfort of your home. There might be some edge-case portable uses like a long trip or visiting friends who you want to play tabletop party games with, but home is the only scenario I can see myself using it.
Beyond that, it’s an interesting device. I do genuinely enjoy having a larger screen to experience more involved games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses or Xenoblade Chronicles 3 on, but the most telling point is that, as soon as I finished testing it for this review, I slotted my Switch back into its regular dock for TV play. I can’t imagine how often I’ll be tempted to put it back into the Orion. The hardware is enticing on paper, but the Up-Switch Orion isn’t a home run implementation of those ideas.