Technology

There have been quite a few reports recently about the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con drift. Many players have experienced that their joysticks are becoming unreliable and pointing them in random directions when they’re playing a game even when they haven’t been physically pushed. Nintendo hasn’t acknowledged that this is a defect yet but a new report claims that the company will fix Joy-Con drift for free even for customers who may be out of warranty.

There were reports that Nintendo could face a class action lawsuit over this so perhaps that’s why the company has decided to be proactive about this and fix the issue even for customers who may not be covered by warranty.

Fujifilm has started making surveillance cameras as well and its first product, the SX800, is a long-rgane surveillance camera that boasts 40x optical zoom. It’s, therefore, best suited for security options at international borders or large commercial facilities, for example.

The Fujifilm SX800 has an integrated lens with a 35mm equivalent focal length of 20mm to 800mm. There’s also an additional digital zoom of 1.25x. The company says that this combined provides the camera with a total focal length equivalent of 1000mm. That should be enough to focus on the license plate of a car from about 0.6 miles away.

Origin has made a gaming machine to end all gaming machines. If you’re the kind of gamer who wants to own all of the consoles and a proper gaming PC then this custom creation from Origin PC will appeal to you. It has the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and a proper gaming PC in one case.

Origin PC has created this machine in order to commemorate its 10th anniversary. This custom gaming machine has an Xbox One X, a PlayStation 4 Pro, and a Nintendo Switch. That’s in addition to a full-fledged gaming PC that’s also in the case.

The lawyers at Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith have filed for a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo in the US, where they alleged that Nintendo sold the Joy-Cons despite knowing that there were issues with it. The lawsuit also alleges that Nintendo has violated California’s fraud laws along with state and federal warranty laws, and are seeking monetary damages.

Nintendo has since issued a statement to The Verge in which they say, “At Nintendo, we take great pride in creating quality products and we are continuously making improvements to them. We are aware of recent reports that some Joy-Con controllers are not responding correctly. We want our consumers to have fun with Nintendo Switch, and if anything falls short of this goal we always encourage them to visit http://support.nintendo.com so we can help.”

However, the good news for Android users is that with the upcoming Android Q update, Google will start to show more detailed battery life on wireless headphones, meaning that you won’t suddenly run out of battery one day, as the percentage will let you know when it is a good time to start charging it.

According to Google, “As True Wireless Stereo (TWS) headphones continue to gain momentum in the market and with users, it is important to build system-wide support for TWS. Later this year, TWS headsets with Fast Pair will be able to broadcast individual battery information for the case and buds. This enables features such as case open and close battery notifications and per-component battery reporting throughout the UI.”

The other day, DJI announced their new gimbal in the form of the DJI Ronin-SC. The camera came with partial support for Fujifilm cameras, a huge plus given that Fujifilm’s cameras can sometimes get overlooked by accessory makers. However, what about the Ronin-S, the predecessor of the Ronin-SC?

For those who are unfamiliar, DJI had previously launched a gimbal for mirrorless cameras in the form of the Ronin-S. The gimbal at that time did not support Fujifilm’s X-series of cameras, but the good news is that it looks like support will finally be on its way. In a tweet in response to a customer on Twitter, DJI noted that they are still working on the firmware for the Ronin-S that will bring support for Fujifilm’s mirrorless cameras.

The first Razer Phone was very well received as it was a proper gaming phone with a unique 120Hz screen. The company’s software support for this device has left a lot to be desired, though. It’s still on Android Oreo and even the security patch is a year old. The company has now said that the Razer Phone Android Pie update is going to be out soon.

It’s an update that many Razer Phone owners are looking forward to. It brings a number of new features to the device in addition to important bug fixes. Razer hasn’t provided a concrete date as yet but confirms that the Android Pie update for the Razer Phone should be out soon.

For most of us, flying to our destinations isn’t always the most enjoyable experience. There is turbulence, food that doesn’t always taste great, inconsiderate seatmates, and so on. However, it seems that a bunch of folks who took a Southwest Airlines flight just got the surprise of their life when Nintendo gifted each and everyone of them a free Switch console.

In addition to the free console, Nintendo also gave them a copy of Super Mario Maker 2, giving passengers a ton of things to do while they flew to their destination. Southwest Airlines has since confirmed the giveaway as being authentic as part of a partnership with Nintendo for the promotion.

Sony Mobile is looking to shutter two more apps according to notices that have appeared. Both the ‘What's New' app and the ‘Audio Recorder' apps will be retired on 30 September 2019. The ‘What's New' app was Sony's curated selection of apps that it was looking to promote. Most users always looked for a way to disable the app, so we don't imagine many will miss it.

There’s a new Nintendo Switch available starting today. It’s not new in the sense that it’s a newer generation. Nintendo has simply refreshed the Switch console and says that this particular one comes with improved battery life. This should be an incentive to purchase for those who would like to have more battery backup when they’re out and about with their Switch.

The company says that this new Nintendo Switch model should provide gamers with an additional two hours of battery life. So this brings the usage estimates to between 4.5 and 9 hours, up from the current estimated battery life range of 2.5 and 6.5 hours.

Basically, there seems to be something wrong with the Joy-Cons in which even if the user is not touching the joystickers, the console will register it as moving. This was confirmed in a report by Kotaku’s Gita Jackson who wrote, “When I was in the combat screen, where the stick on the right Joy-Con controls the overhead angle of the camera, the camera angle would slowly drift until it was directly overhead.”

Jackson is not alone in experiencing this issue as other Kotaku staff members have similarly confirmed the issue themselves, along with many other gamers in a post on Reddit that got over 25,000 upvotes. While wear and tear seems to be the norm when it comes to hardware, some gamers claim to have only owned the console for a few months before the problems began to show.

Sony has come out swinging at its rivals with the new A7R IV full-frame mirrorless camera which touts a 61 megapixel back-side illuminated sensor with 15 dynamic range stops. This camera thus delivers the highest resolution yet for a full-frame setup. It even lets users capture images of up to 240 megapixels with the pixel-shift mode while also delivering 26.2 megapixel photos in APS-C crop mode. The ISO range is fairly generous, going up from 100 to 32,000 or from 50 to 102,400 in expanded mode.

The camera body itself has been redesigned and now has a deeper, larger grip so Sony has certainly fixed one of the issues that users had with the A7R III. There’s a five axis image stabilizer which should be good for both video and still images. Sony has also put in a new 5.76 million dot OLED electronic viewfinder which is the highest resolution yet on a camera from the company.

When Fujifilm launched the X-H1 mirrorless camera, it was one of the few Fujifilm cameras that came with a top LCD display. This kind of display can be found on DSLR cameras from the likes of Canon and Nikon, but rarely on Fujifilm cameras. However, it seems that now that Fujifilm has implemented it, they could be looking at ways to improve on it.

According to a report from Fuji Rumors, they have stumbled across a patent which suggests that Fujifilm has been toying with the idea of making the LCD panel touch sensitive. Now the screen itself is pretty small, so it’s not as if it will be used in the same way you might expect from a touch LCD panel mounted on the back of the camera.

We had heard that the operating system that the company is developing is known as HongMeng, but now it turns out that Huawei might be having second thoughts. According to a report from the South China Morning Post, Huawei chairman Liang Hua was quoted as saying, “We haven’t decided whether to develop Hongmeng into a smartphone OS yet.”

We should point out that Liang’s statement was merely a clarification about its HongMeng platform, where the company did acknowledge that it was in development, although it seemed to be mostly aimed at Internet of Things devices, as opposed to smartphones. This doesn’t mean that the company isn’t working on an Android alternative, but according to Liang, they would ultimately still prefer to use Android if they can.