The rumour from Eurogamer about the detachable controllers acting as standalone controllers for multiplayer annoys me when looking at the other rumours. They put that rumour out before the other rumour appeared about the detachable controllers acting as Wii Remotes.
So most people thought that the detachable controllers acted as sideways controllers but, I've already gone over why I think that's unlikely.
Looking at this again, we had a conflict occur where one source claimed the right side of the face buttons were above the circle pad, the other said below.
Due to the lack of information about the dev kits, (what model they are) we don't know what the latest dev kit is. I have to look at this in different ways.
I already talked about standalone sideways controllers, now I'm going to talk about standalone Wii Remotes for the detachable controllers.
Emily states that there are at least 2 shoulder buttons, problem is from every mock-up seen from Emily and LPVG have no shoulder buttons sighted.
Some people stated that it probably wasn't important because there wasn't anything special. So the annoyance of subjectivity and conjecture comes into play.
Either there are shoulder buttons but they weren't anything special that they didn't need to be drawn, or maybe they were incorrectly labeled and should have been mentioned as trigger buttons.
The problem is that trigger buttons have also been on shoulders of controllers as seen in the Xbox 360 and PS3, however you'd know from the Wii Remote and the N64 controller that a trigger button is placed behind a controller, not on the shoulder.
So I think that the shoulder buttons mentioned by Emily are actually trigger buttons placed behind the detachable controllers.
Now, about the detachable controllers. I'm starting to think that they are supposed to be symmetric when attached to the NX. That means they should appear as the NX displayed on the right of the image above.
Why? For the sake of symmetry with standalone detachable controllers in multiplayer acting as Wii Remotes. I can imagine that compared to the old Wii Remote, the D-pad is replaced by the circle pad and, the 1,2 buttons are replaced by A,B,X,Y or split D-pad face buttons. The trigger button would be placed behind the controller near the top.
In a sense, I am pointing out how it is similar to the old Wii Remote so that BC using these controllers would be possible. (Via the Virtual Console mind you.)
This is why I couldn't see this working with the asymmetric controllers on Emily's mock-up of the NX. You'd have to flip one of the controller around and whether there's a shoulder button or trigger button on there, it would be flipped to the other side towards your chest. So you can't even have symmetric Wii Remotes, I doubt Nintendo are planning some kind of Asymmetric Wii Remote function that wouldn't apparently cause confusion for consumers.
So I'm thinking that, if the Eurogamer rumour is true about detachable controllers acting as standalone for multiplayer. Then for it to work in Wii Remote style, that means the NX should be the device on the right for the image above which has symmetric detachable controllers.
If the rumour is fake/wrong. Then the detachable controllers don't act as standalone multiplayer controllers and hence the NX device should look like the one on the left that has asymmetric detachable controllers.
(I already gave my reasons on the pages before about why I don't expect standalone detachable sideways controllers for multiplayer, I don't really want to bother with that again.)