New(ish) Nintendo Switch, and more tech news today

After months (or years?) Of leaks and speculation about an updated Nintendo Switch console, the Japanese gaming giant finally unveiled its new hardware yesterday … via a tweet.

The lack of fanfare was somewhat justified, however. The new $ 350 Nintendo Switch (OLED) Console launches October 8th and is an incremental upgrade at best.

In fact, the only significant upgrade is the OLED screen of the same name, and even that isn’t all that impressive. For reference, the almost ten-year-old PlayStation Vita came with a 5-inch OLED screen (and bluetooth audio for booting).

You can use the official (and somewhat crunchy) Announcement trailer herebut here are the facts:

What Ninten did:

• New 7-inch OLED screen with reduced bevel, better contrast and more vivid colors.
• Wider stand that adapts to different viewing angles.
• Added LAN port to dock for improved online play.
• The internal memory has been increased to 64 GB (from 32 GB).
• Slightly improved speakers.
• Now comes in a new white colorway.

What Ninten didn’t do:

• No internal improvements. It has the same chipset, memory and battery life as the standard switch.
• No improved resolution. The OLED panel is still 720p, which means reduced sharpness due to the lower PPI.
• No 4K output. Docked playback still peaks at 1080p.
• No bluetooth audio. You still need to buy a dongle.
• No updated Joy-Cons. Expect drift over time.

For whom is that?

• If you already have a Nintendo Switch, this isn’t a huge upgrade. The larger OLED screen is great for handheld gaming, but since the resolution stays the same, it’s not a game changer.
• If you don’t already have a Switch and don’t want the non-dockable Nintendo Switch Lite, it’s probably worth the extra $ 50 over the base model.
• If your primarily gaming on a TV in docked mode, there are few reasons to get the OLED model. Apart from the LAN port in the new dock, the performance will exactly match that of the cheaper model.
• From a business perspective, the new model may be less about pleasing hardcore gamers than about stabilizing demand. How NPD analyst Mat Piscatella it says:
• “Earlier, Nintendo portable revisions would stabilize the demand curve and solidify ASPs. Their aim was to maintain sales performance and to prevent the pull of price drops and obsolete inventories. The Switch OLED is straight out of this successful playbook. “

Note that there is still no mention of a Nintendo Switch Pro what most fans really wanted / expected. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in progress, but it’s unlikely to be released before the end of 2022, perhaps paired with the highly anticipated sequel to Breath of the Wild.

My favorite recording? “The real Switch Pro were the friends we made along the way.” (Via Reddit users u / FinalHero13).

👂 Nothing continues to leak information about its first product, the Ear 1 earbuds. In this case it is a Price under $ 100 and active noise cancellation (Android authority).

📷 Megapixel Wars may be slowing down, and Samsung is rumored to be Sticking to a 108MP sensor in its upcoming Galaxy S22 lineup, which focuses on “polishing” rather than more raw pixels (Android authority).

Speaking of Samsung, the Galaxy S21 FE was recently discovered passes China’s TENAA certification body revealing important details about the upcoming device (Android authority).

🐌 Recent evidence suggests that the OnePlus 9 Pro may slow down performance in Chrome (AnandTech).

🛠 Sources suggest President Biden may urge the Federal Trade Commission to be established new “right to repair” rules. This would be big news for consumer technologies like smartphones, but the big winners would actually be farmers (Bloomberg).

👃 Amazon is Sell ​​COVID-19 Test Kits Now for $ 39.99, with results in 24 hours. Experience the excitement of incredibly invasive nasal swabs from the comfort of your own home! (Tech crunch).

🕹 What could be a huge boon for game developers is Amazon makes its Lumberyard game engine open source, a free alternative to licensed products like Unity (VentureBeat).

🏎 Peugeot has revealed his new hypercar which is used for the endurance race of the 24 Hours of Le Mans and several other events of the World Endurance Championship series (Ars Technica).

In perhaps the smallest application of AI technology in recent years, digital artist Dries Depoorter used facial recognition to see how often Flemish politicians are distracted from their smartphones during parliamentary sessions.

Every time the software detects a wrong look, the politician on Twitter is called under the handle and embarrassed The Flemish Scroller.

You could argue that they could do important tasks on their phones, but there is an opposite story. The Flemish Prime Minister Jan Jambon, for example, sparked outrage in 2019 when he spotted playing Angry Birds on his phone during a policy debate in Parliament (via The Brussels time).

For my part, I welcome this kind of responsibility (at least while still working from home).

Until tomorrow,

Nick Fernandez, editor