Sales of the Switch will have Nintendo smiling, but the problems with the hardware owners are highlighting will not. And there's one issue that could come back to haunt Nintendo in the near future: the left Joy-Con can struggle to make and maintain a wireless connection.
What's strange is this issue only seems to affect the left Joy-Con, not the right. That suggests the design of the two is different, and as Arstechnica highlighted, YouTube channel Spawn Wave discovered this is indeed the case as well as the probable cause of the connection issues.
The right Joy-Con contains more tech in the form of an IR sensor and an NFC chip. So Nintendo's hardware team decided it required a dedicated Bluetooth antenna in the form of a gray cable attached to the board. The left Joy-Con doesn't contain those extra sensors, so it looks as though Nintendo tried to save a bit of cash by integrating the Bluetooth antenna directly on to the circuit board.
The image below is taken from iFixit's teardown of the Switch with the internals of the left Joy-Con shown on the right (blue casing). Notice the lack of the gray wire (Bluetooth antenna).
There's two problems with choosing to do that. The first is its placement, which is right next to a large metal casing and therefore will have a detrimental effect on the signal. The second is also to do with placement, as it's in an area of the Joy-Con that will also be covered by a user's hand.
In the video by Spawn Wave below, he adds an antenna cable to the left Joy-Con so as it mirrors the setup of the right Joy-Con. His experiments reveal that not only does this fix the connection problem, it ends up working better than the right Joy-Con and keeps its connection even 40 feet away from the Switch.
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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 continue to come in about the connection issues, Nintendo may be forced to offer a replacement program for the left Joy-Con.
It seems ridiculous to me that this issue wasn't picked up during hardware testing, and that the fix is a simple piece of copper wire.
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