Nintendo May End Up Recalling Switch's Left Joy-Con

Sales of the Switch will have Nintendo smiling, merely the problems with the hardware owners are highlighting volition not. And there'southward one issue that could come back to haunt Nintendo in the near future: the left Joy-Con tin struggle to make and maintain a wireless connexion.

What'south foreign is this event only seems to affect the left Joy-Con, not the right. That suggests the design of the 2 is different, and as Arstechnica highlighted, YouTube channel Spawn Moving ridge discovered this is indeed the example equally well as the probable cause of the connection issues.

The right Joy-Con contains more tech in the grade of an IR sensor and an NFC chip. And so Nintendo'due south hardware squad decided it required a dedicated Bluetooth antenna in the grade of a grey cable fastened to the board. The left Joy-Con doesn't contain those extra sensors, so information technology looks equally though Nintendo tried to save a bit of greenbacks by integrating the Bluetooth antenna directly on to the circuit board.

The image below is taken from iFixit'southward teardown of the Switch with the internals of the left Joy-Con shown on the right (blueish casing). Observe the lack of the gray wire (Bluetooth antenna).

At that place'southward two bug with choosing to do that. The first is its placement, which is right next to a large metallic casing and therefore will accept a detrimental effect on the signal. The 2d is besides to do with placement, as it's in an surface area of the Joy-Con that will also exist covered by a user's mitt.

In the video by Spawn Wave beneath, he adds an antenna cablevision to the left Joy-Con so equally it mirrors the setup of the right Joy-Con. His experiments reveal that not but does this prepare the connectedness problem, it ends up working better than the correct Joy-Con and keeps its connexion even xl anxiety away from the Switch.

Nintendo is surely aware of this problem by now and I wouldn't be surprised to see an antenna cable added to the left Joy-Con going forward. However, depending on how many complaints keep to come up in nearly the connexion problems, Nintendo may exist forced to offering a replacement program for the left Joy-Con.

It seems ridiculous to me that this consequence wasn't picked upward during hardware testing, and that the set is a elementary piece of copper wire.