Nintendo has filed a new patent for what looks like new features and items to be used on the Nintendo Switch 2.
Our source for this is YouTuber Mike Odyssey, who made a whole video on this patent which you can watch below. Mike looks at the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website for work. Because of this, he gets to check the site for new applications made by Nintendo. Mike had previously shared that Nintendo filed a trademark application for the DS, which doesn’t seem to have led anything related to games so far. But this new patent is clearly more interesting than that.
Patent Appl. No. 18/579,140 was filed by Nintendo, and among the listed inventors for the patents is Nintendo EPD Senior General Manager Yoshiaki Koizumi. The patent is for an Information Processing System, Information Processing Device, Controller Device and Accessory, and it was filed last March 6 of this year.
Mike discusses in his video that certain images in the patent application seem to corroborate earlier rumors that the Switch 2 will use magnets to connect the Joy-Cons to the console. The rumors started out as a blind item, but video game peripheral company Mobapad lent credence to them by posting a surprisingly detailed description of the upcoming console. We’ll move on from this now, as you will immediately understand what these images show below.
Our first image shows what looks like a revised Switch 2 dock. The dock appears to function the same as the original, but the screen side is no longer covered up, and is still visibly displayed. There is also a button at the left hand side, but we don’t know what it’s for for now.
We did wonder if this means that the console could continue to display information after it is docked. However, the patent includes a flowchart that shows that if the console is attached to the dock, the display will still output to the TV, and it will then display back to the console if it’s removed from the dock.
This next image shows a detached left Joy-Con, with a proper d-pad on top and the conventional four button diamond layout below. That could mean games which use the left analog stick, mainly for movement, could now be taking inputs from a d-pad instead.
And this image shows us a complete console with a new layout for the right Joy-Con. This new Joy-Con has the four button diamond on top and the right analog stick below. This layout would be the reverse of what we have now on the current Switch Joy-Cons. And it would change the layout from what Nintendo copied from Microsoft’s Xbox controllers, back to the Wii U GamePad and Pro controller layout.
I personally prefer the Wii U layout, so I would be the target market for this. But we don’t have to argue on this, because the patents also show controllers with the original Joy-Con configuration. So, more or less, we can buy different Joy-Cons to get the layouts we like.
This is all interesting stuff, and if you know how to find it, you can confirm that this patent is absolutely real. There’s no guarantee that all or any of the patents filed here will actually be used on Nintendo’s next console. But if you checked the history for this sort of thing, these patents get published shortly before or after the products named are actually announced and revealed. So if it’s real, we will not have to wait that long to find out. And yes, there’s a rumor for that too.
We thank Mike Odyssey for this find and you can watch his video on it below.
