Last night, we learned that Nintendo isn’t planning on shipping the Nintendo Switch with a web browser, “at least at launch.” That’s on top of the news that at launch, it won’t have any video streaming apps like Netflix, Amazon video, or Hulu. I suspect that hoping for a Kindle app would be a pipe dream. At least at first — and probably for the foreseeable future — the Switch will be for one thing: playing games.
Here’s the thing, though: imagine you’re somebody who wants to spend around $300 on a tablet — what you’d want it for is precisely the list of things I just enumerated: watching video, playing games, reading books, and doing some light web browsing. It’s the sort of use case that has made a market for Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets.
So it’s a shame that Nintendo isn’t launching with those extra features — because if it did, I can almost guarantee you it would replace the space in my travel bag previously taken up by my iPad. I don’t use the iPad for productivity anyway — I just use my laptop. And for more casual users who aren’t interested in trying to make a tablet into a productivity device, it would have a decent shot at being their next purchase in lieu of an Android tablet from Amazon, or possibly even an iPad.