Excelerate Gaming Portable Switch Dock Review
60One of the things I absolutely love about the Nintendo Switch is the ability to play console-quality games regardless of if you are on the go or at home. One of the things with taking the Switch or Switch OLED with you on the road, however, is having to transport the Nintendo Switch dock to connect to a TV. At the 2024 Midwest Gaming Classic, the team at Excelerate Gaming handed me their new Nintendo Switch Dock, designed to be portable, fit in the palm of your hand, and only cost 20 bucks. Let's take a look and see if its performance exceeds its size.
Order the Excelerate Gaming Portable Switch Dock At https://excelerategaming.com/products/portable-switch-dock
Out of the box, the Excelerate Gaming Portable Nintendo Switch Dock features a female USB-C port for power, a female HDMI port to connect to a TV, and a single USB 3.0 port to connect accessories. This does mean that you will have fewer overall ports in the end compared to the original dock, but you're also a fraction of the size. Generally speaking, this is not designed to replace your dock at home, but for you to use when you are on the go. As such you probably won't need as many USB ports if you are traveling for business or on a vacation. On the other side, a roughly 6-inch long USB-C Male pigtail is attached to the unit to connect to your Switch. They do not include a power supply to use with the unit, and I'm okay with that. Just pick up one of the OEM Nintendo Switch power supplies and call it a day and you will be good.
I did pick the brains of the guys at Excelerate Gaming quite a bit at the Midwest Gaming Classic, trying to ask questions for all of you that you would want to have answered. I asked if they knew whether or not this would work with the Steam Deck, and they did not know at the time. Thankfully our buddy Jesse from Marseille had a Steam Deck which he was able to bring to the convention on Sunday to test out to verify that it does work. I asked if it was PD 2.0 or PD 3.0 compliant, they said it was PD compliant but did not know off the top of their heads if it was 2.0 or 3.0. I asked if they were going to offer any sort of anti-bricking guarantee, where if someone used their portable dock and it reportedly damaged their Switch if they would cover the cost of repair or replacement. They had not considered doing something like that, but they are looking into the viability of doing so into the future.
Connecting the Excelerate Gaming Portable Switch Dock to your Switch or Switch OLED is super simple. All you need to do is plug the male USB-C pigtail into the bottom of your Switch, connect your power supply and HDMI cable and you are off to the races.
For something like this at this cost, one of my biggest concerns is performance, lag, and latency. I fired up one of my usual tests, Street Fighter 2 30th Anniversary Edition to start my testing and evaluating. Initially with the analog stick, using a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, I was having some problems pulling off the dragon uppercut with Ryu. I was able to pull it off using the d-pad so I'm assuming it was probably me just being super tired more than anything else. I was able to pull it off later using the analog stick as well.
The audio and visuals were quite nice out of the dock. The colors looked vibrant, they didn't look washed out, and audio seems spot on. I even connected my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra to it to test whether or not it would work as a Dex dock. I was very pleased to see it worked flawlessly with Samsung Dex.
Why it RoX:
- Only $20
- It just works
- Amazingly portable
- USB-A, HDMI, and USB-C connectors
What could be improved:
- The included instruction manual does not match the product
- Only one USB port
- Not their original design
Should you buy one?
These sorts of docs have been around for quite some time, but at $20 this is one of the least expensive. The aluminum casing is nice and should handle getting thrown into a backpack or other case fairly well. I do wish that they would update what manual is included, as the one that I got did not match the port configuration of the unit that I tested. Also, I'd like to see them take the next step and actually work on the product development side versus finding a vendor who could just produce a product for them. I commend them for their entrepreneurship and I wish them very well in the future. You can legit find units like this on Temu or AliExpress, so they need to work on making a better product and differentiating their product from others on the market. For $20 this is a pretty good unit, but you can tell that it's a first attempt.
#nintendo #NintendoSwitch #SwitchDock #PortableSwitchDock #SwitchOled #ExcelerateGaming #MIdwestGamingClassic
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