If there's one major complaint that has been consistent across almost all the initial reviews of the Nintendo Switch ( including ours ), it has been the way that the left Joy-Con seems to have trouble maintaining a consistent wireless Bluetooth connection at certain distances. Now that the system is out, a YouTube hacker has opened up the controllers and discovered a design issue that seems to be causing the problem, and he even came up with a fix.

Spawn Wave Media's Joy-Con teardown video goes into significant detail identifying the various parts of both Switch controllers. The key bit, though, starts around the 20-minute mark, where the left Joy-Con gets opened up and the hacker says he's "not seeing any real antenna on this board." That's a bit of a surprise, since the right Joy-Con, opened earlier in the video, featured a dedicated antenna connected to the board via a small cable along the inside edge of the controller (where the tips of your fingers grip the controller). Then again, the right Joy-Con is laid out differently from its sibling (with the analog stick and face buttons essentially flipped) and sports an IR sensor on the bottom, so there is some potential reason for the change.

A bit more inspection shows the left Joy-Con does sport a Bluetooth antenna that's built into the circuit board itself, running up the top outside edge of the controller. That's right next to where the controller usually rests in your palm, which could cause your hand to block the Bluetooth signal quite easily. And while Spawn Wave notes that the PS4 has a similar on-board Bluetooth antenna design, the Switch's left Joy-Con antenna differs by "sitting next to a piece of metal" holding the circuitry for the Joy-Con's analog stick, possibly causing more interference.

Not content to simply identify the potential design issue with the left Joy-Con, in a follow-up video Spawn Wave takes steps to fix it. After simply soldering a piece of wire to the Joy-Con's Bluetooth chip, the controller works consistently from a distance of 30 feet in Spawn Wave's tests. The unmodified right Joy-Con, meanwhile, started showing some connection issues at about 20 feet away (the particular distance where either Joy-Con starts running into problems seems to vary considerably based on room layout and potential sources of interference, as Nintendo's own FAQ on the subject notes. We ran into significant left Joy-Con issues sitting about 10 feet from the system.)

Late last week, Nintendo issued a statement saying it was "looking into" Joy-Con connection issues and would "continue to monitor the performance of Nintendo Switch hardware and software, and make improvements when necessary." This series of videos seems to show not only why the left Joy-Con's performance has been so spotty, but also that making necessary improvements should not be very difficult for Nintendo.

When the original Famicom first launched in Japan, Nintendo issued a full recall to fix a manufacturing issue that caused some games to freeze on some systems. Given the widespread impact of the left Joy-Con connection issue so far and the seeming ease with which it can be fixed with a redesign, a similar recall seems to be warranted this time around.

Listing image by Spawn Wave Media / YouTube