Month: January 2017

Enlarge / A Switch Joy-Con sits alongside a 3DS XL, just as Nintendo says the Switch will sit alongside the 3DS in the marketplace. (credit: Kotaku)

With the Nintendo Switch acting as both a fully portable system and a TV-based console, you might think that the hardware is intended to serve as a replacement for both the Wii U and the 3DS. But while the Wii U has already been discontinued, Nintendo insists that the 3DS will continue to be supported well into the Switch's lifespan.

"In our view, the Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo Switch are going to live side-by-side," Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime told Wired in a recent interview. "They’re going to coexist just fine. We’ve done this before, managing two different systems."

While it's definitely true that Nintendo has managed two (or more) systems at the same time in the past, the company does not usually maintain two portable systems concurrently for very long. Back in 2004, for instance, Nintendo revealed the Nintendo DS as a "third pillar" in its hardware line up, alongside the existing Game Boy Advance and GameCube platforms.

Jonathan Gitlin

DETROIT—The North American International Auto Show in Detroit has a bit of a problem. You see, CES takes place in the days directly before it, and in recent years automakers have started making big announcements in Las Vegas. This also affects the annual Los Angeles Auto Show (which takes place in November), but the effect is more pronounced at Detroit. The result—in my view at least—is three underwhelming events in a row. That's not to say there weren't big announcements in Detroit. It doesn't get much bigger than Toyota's eighth-generation Camry or BMW's seventh-generation 5 Series, for example.

We've covered the headliners already, so the gallery here represents all the little wonders we stumbled across in Cobo Hall. There was a face-lifted Ford F-150, the cabin of which was more Range Rover-like than ever. The venerable F-150 is Ford's top seller, and the refreshed 2018 model gets a full complement of advanced driver assists.

Enlarge (credit: Vivaldi)

Working in tight niches occupied by the behemoths of the Internet world is hard; doing it as a startup without external funding is even harder. The 35-strong team of Vivaldi, the spiritual successor to Opera, is doing exactly that: two years after the first public beta and eight months after the release of version 1.0, the Web browser has about 1 million users—but it still isn't turning a profit.

Vivaldi, which was envisioned by the Opera Software co-founder and former CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, is catering first of all to power users and the tech-savvy lot. The team, however, has high expectations for their product and hopes it will have a broader appeal over time in order to start actually making money.

More is more

In case you haven't heard about Vivaldi before, it's a Chromium-based “non-conformist” desktop Web browser that goes in the opposite direction to the mainstream. While the major players like Chrome or Firefox are stripping the browser to its bare essentials, Vivaldi offers more and more integrated features and customisation options.

JAXA

This weekend Japan tried to launch a 3kg cubesat into orbit aboard its multi-stage, SS-520 rocket. Were it to have succeeded, the SS-520 would have become the smallest rocket to ever deliver a payload into orbit. Alas, the rocket did not make it.

According to the Japanese Exploration Agency, or JAXA, the sounding rocket launched on Sunday morning from the Uchinoura Space Center on the country's southernmost main island, Kyushu. Although the first stage fired normally, a preplanned check between first-stage separation and the ignition of the second ignition did not show consistent telemetry data. This prevented the firing of the second stage, and the rocket fell into the Pacific Ocean, southeast of the spaceport.