Nintendo has never shied away from putting its strange and experimental ideas into practice with its hardware, as consoles like the Wii, the DS, and the Switch (to name a few) have shown over the years, and unsurprisingly, the company is continuing to concoct more ideas that are as far away from “ordinary” as they possibly could be.
A new Nintendo patent discovered by Game Rant, for instance, describes a portable device with a dual screen structure, similar to the 3DS, and though it seems to have a similar clamshell design, it also seems to have a screen facing outward when the device is closed.
More interesting, however, is the fact that the device shown in the patent (for which you can see images below) can be split in half. Effectively, both screens can function independently of each other, which means you can detach the two from each other, letting them serve as two separate handhelds- sort of like a cross between the DS/3DS and the Switch.
Of course, a patent doesn’t necessarily have to reflect the things a company will end up doing in the future, and Nintendo in particular has a history of filing patents that it ends up not following up on, so there’s no guarantees that we’ll ever see a console similar to what’s been described here.
For what it’s worth, reports have claimed that the Switch 2 (or whatever Nintendo’s next-gen console ends up being called) will be a another hybrid machine similar to the original Nintendo Switch.
