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Mere days away from the Nintendo Switch's launch, elements of uncertainty still surround the final technical specifications for the new console - but a massive leak of Nintendo's developer documentation, along with a teardown of retail hardware by a Chinese parts firm may well have given the game away. Meanwhile, new information we've sourced reveals final tweaks Nintendo has made to hardware performance in the run-up to the console's release.As things stand, the documentation leak - dated as it is - serves to confirm much of what we already know about the system, but the teardown is something else. What's immediately apparent is that build quality and design is excellent. The Switch is a compact, elegant but simple design. The 4310mAh, 16Whr battery takes up a good portion of the internal space and by the looks of it, third party replacements by the end-user shouldn't be too difficult. Switch is held together by screws, with no evidence of the troublesome glue used in recent smartphone and tablet designs that makes taking apart (and putting back together) the latest gadgets so much more difficult.
There are a few additional points we can make about the Switch's set-up based on the Chinese teardown photography - a detachable MicroSD card reader is an interesting choice, for example. It seems to sit on top of the heat-shield when the unit is first opened. Quite why Nintendo would choose to make this a replaceable part is a bit of a mystery. The 32GB of eMMC NAND storage also seems to occupy its own mini-daughterboard, as opposed to being soldered directly onto the mainboard. This offers Nintendo the chance to more easily produce premium SKUs with more generous storage capacity, while retaining the same mainboard.
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