I loved flying with a Nintendo Switch 2 earlier this year and plugging in the Xreal 1S display glasses via a battery-pack dock called the Xreal Neo. But that was just a foretaste of another piece of tech that won’t come to fruition.
Unfortunately, Xreal’s Neo dock is no longer being released, with the company citing reliability, battery longevity and other operational concerns.
Anyone who preordered one of the $100 battery pack mini-docks is getting a refund, according to Xreal, along with a $30 credit to spend on other Xreal products. When I spoke with Xreal’s product reps to better understand the situation, I was told the concerns are entirely performance-related, not safety-related.
Xreal’s CEO, Chi Xu, explained the situation on a Reddit post earlier today. “During final review, we identified areas that did not meet our rigorous internal reliability and standards,” Xu wrote. “Out of an abundance of care, we made the difficult decision not to ship Neo, rather than release a product that does not fully meet our standards.”
When I tried the Neo in a prerelease form, it worked reasonably well for outputting Switch 2 to Xreal’s glasses, but Metroid Prime 4 had notable frame-rate performance issues that made it unplayable. Still, I liked the device’s small size compared to much larger portable Switch dock-slash-batteries like Viture’s Pro Mobile Dock. It made me wish Nintendo Switches worked better with video-out accessories in the first place.
What’s clear is that the Nintendo Switch continues to be a thorn in the otherwise intriguing world of display glasses as portable gaming or work monitors. Xreal has another higher-end set of Asus gaming glasses coming later this year, designed for PC and console gaming, and Windows handhelds and Steam Decks can work with display glasses like those from Xreal, Viture and TCL just fine without adapters. Phones and laptops and tablets can, too.
I asked Nintendo’s executives whether proper display-glass support would ever come to the Nintendo Switch 2 during the launch event in New York last April, and got a clear answer: It’s not on Nintendo’s radar for now. You could always try another mini-dock option that’s still on sale, but I loved the Neo’s size the most. Maybe it’ll resurface again in the future, but for now it’s gone for good.
