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Report: Nintendo will fix Joy-Con drift for free, offer refunds - Polygon
Google Photos hit a billion users in just over four years - Engadget
Sony WF-1000XM3 Review: The Perfect Travel Companion | WIRED - WIRED

Report: Nintendo will fix Joy-Con drift for free, offer refunds - Polygon

Posted: 24 Jul 2019 08:01 AM PDT

Nintendo's policy toward customer reports of "Joy-Con drift" is to offer a free repair, according to an internal memo obtained and reported by Vice.

The memo, which Vice said it had seen, says customers are not required to provide proof of purchase and support representatives don't have to check if the product is under warranty. Customers may also request a refund if they paid to repair their controllers, too. "Confirm the prior repair and then issue a refund," says the memo, according to Vice.

Officially, Nintendo responded to Vice with the same boilerplate reply it has given since the Joy-Con controversy bubbled up, with news of the Nintendo Switch Lite and its permanently attached analog sticks, and then boiled over last week with a report in Kotaku. Joy-Con drift is when a game records movement on one of the controllers' analog sticks even if they're sitting stationary. Nintendo recently said it was "aware of recent reports that some Joy-Con controllers are not responding correctly."

The problem is widespread enough to have a class-action lawsuit filed against Nintendo of America on behalf of thousands of consumers. The law firm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith filed the complaint on Friday and says that more than 5,500 Joy-Con users reached out during its investigation of the matter.

In the memo Vice saw, customer support reps are also told how to walk callers through troubleshooting steps. But the bottom line is that no-charge repairs, or refunds for past repairs that didn't work, are on the table.

As for the Nintendo Switch Lite, customer support reps are instructed to tell callers "We expect our hardware to perform as designed," and not to comment on news of the class action lawsuit.

Polygon has reached out to Nintendo of America again for additional comment and if any answer is given specific to the Joy-Con issue or the lawsuit, this post will be updated.

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Google Photos hit a billion users in just over four years - Engadget

Posted: 24 Jul 2019 08:01 AM PDT

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Google has confirmed Google Photos now has more than a billion users. It surpassed the milestone earlier this summer, a little over four years after it unveiled Photos, Google told Fast Company in a profile of the service.

The company spun out Photos from Google+ at I/O 2015. It's the ninth Google product to hit the billion-user mark, following Search, Gmail, Chrome, Drive, Maps, YouTube, Play Store and Android, but it got there a lot faster than many of those. Gmail, for instance, took 12 years to add a tenth digit to its user numbers. Facebook and Instagram, meanwhile, each hit a billion users in about eight years.

One of the reasons Google hit the figure relatively quickly is because it frequently adds new useful features to Photos. The latest is Gallery Go, which is a lightweight photo manager for Android. It lets people manage their images offline and can automatically sort them by categories including people, documents and places.