Gear Live: The Latest Tech, Gadgets, AI, and Gaming News
Switch 2 Owners Are Getting Banned, and Nintendo Isn’t Saying Why
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Video Games,
Turn on your Switch 2 and find that Nintendo Switch Online is gone, the eShop won't load, and the screen is showing error code 2124-4508. Nintendo's own support page is blunt about what that means: the console has been permanently banned from connecting online for breaching the user agreements. A growing number of Switch 2 owners have been staring at that message since Saturday, and plenty of them say they have never run a pirated game.
The complaints piled up on the r/NintendoSwitchHelp subreddit over the weekend. One owner posting as OutlandishnessHour37 bought a console through the Indonesian marketplace Tokopedia back in June. Another, MathPrestigious, bought from Yodobashi Camera in Japan and got banned two days after taking it home. On the Chinese social app RedNote, at least 150 people have posted about losing network features. The reports stretch across Asia, Europe and the United States, though a pile of social posts is not a reliable way to measure how big a problem actually is.
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9 Smart Home Upgrades That INSTANTLY Improve Your Life (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Videos,
You don't notice how much friction lives in your house until someone points it out. You dig for keys every time you get home. You cross the room for a light switch that's always on the wrong wall. Your blinds offer blinding sun or total darkness and nothing in between. None of it feels broken, because that's how houses have always worked. I've been deleting that friction one piece at a time, and these are the nine upgrades that did it, from a $40 smart plug to one that costs a lot more than I'd like to admit.
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OpenAI Says It Built an ‘Automated Research Intern,’ and Graded Its Own Work
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Last fall, Sam Altman said OpenAI would have an "automated research intern" by September 2026. On Sunday, OpenAI said it hit the target. The company set the goal, wrote the definition, took the measurements, and published the grade.
Here is that definition, in OpenAI's words: "a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days." Three qualifiers carry the weight there. The tasks are well-defined, a human is steering, and the horizon is a few days rather than a few months.
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TCL Printed a 28-Inch Tri-Fold OLED Monitor That Folds Down to 16 Inches
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Displays, Peripherals,
Portable monitors have a size problem. The ones big enough to be useful are a pain to carry, and the ones easy to carry are barely worth unpacking. TCL's display arm brought a possible way out to IFA 2026 in Berlin: a 28-inch ultrawide OLED panel that folds twice and shrinks down to roughly a 16-inch package.
You can't buy it. This is a prototype, and CSOT has been hauling it around the trade show circuit since MWC back in March, with no price and no release date attached. What makes it worth a second look is how the screen was made. Instead of the vacuum evaporation process behind nearly every OLED you own, an inkjet printer laid the glowing material down.
Click to continue reading TCL Printed a 28-Inch Tri-Fold OLED Monitor That Folds Down to 16 Inches
Valve Leaked Its Own Left 4 Dead 2 Trailer To Get Around The ESRB
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Features, Video Games,
In October 2009, a few weeks before Left 4 Dead 2 shipped, a cinematic trailer for the game turned up online with nobody's name attached. Kotaku covered it on October 22 under the headline "Leaked Left 4 Dead 2 Trailer Full Of Joy, Gore." It was not much of a leak.
Chet Faliszek, a writer on both Left 4 Dead games, says Valve put it there on purpose because the ESRB would not clear it for release. "We leaked our trailer ahead of time, because they wouldn't let us release the trailer," he says in a YouTube video titled "Cutting Left 4 Dead Lines." "I'll just admit that. I think we can't get in trouble for that now. It's like 20 years ago."
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TCL P80 Ultra Puts NXTPAPER on an AMOLED Screen for the First Time
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Displays,
Take any phone outside on a sunny day and the screen turns into a mirror. TCL has been working on that problem for years with NXTPAPER, its matte, paper-like screen treatment, and the catch was always that you had to take it on an LCD. The new P80 Ultra and P80 Pro, both announced at IFA this week, are the first phones where you don't have to make that swap.
Both use a 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED running at 120Hz and peaking at 3,200 nits, with the NXTPAPER layer built into the panel. The Ultra starts at 549 euros for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, or 599 euros for 512GB. The Pro is 429 euros. A third phone, the plain P80, comes in at 349 euros and skips the NXTPAPER treatment entirely. European sales started September 3, Latin America follows in October, and TCL says the US gets them later without saying when or for how much.
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Gamescom Apologizes to the Indie Devs Whose Laptops Were Stolen, Promises a Security Review
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Video Games,
Losing a laptop at a trade show is bad. Losing the only copy of the game you have been building for months, at the show where you were finally going to put it in front of people, is worse. That is close to what happened to several indie studios at Gamescom 2026, and for about a week the show's answer was to point at its own terms and conditions.
That answer has changed. In a statement posted to X, Gamescom said the criticism it took was justified, then said the part it skipped the first time around: "Our first response did not strike the right tone, and it did not show the people affected the empathy they deserved. We are sorry."
The Xbox Disaster Microsoft Never Recovered From (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games, Videos,
Microsoft spent a decade building Xbox into the console everyone's friends owned, then burned it down in about an hour. On May 21, 2013, Don Mattrick walked onto a stage in a white tent on Microsoft's Redmond campus and spent the first 30 minutes of the Xbox One reveal talking about TV. When a reporter asked what people without reliable internet were supposed to do with a console that phoned home every 24 hours, he told them to buy an Xbox 360. Xbox still hasn't recovered, and I think the reason has less to do with that stage than with what players were doing at home.
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NVIDIA Is Selling RTX 50 GPUs at MSRP at PAX West, If You Can Find the Right Guy
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Video Games,
The cheapest way to buy a GeForce RTX 5090 at $1,999 this weekend involves a PAX West badge, a walk through the Seattle Convention Center, and watching one Nvidia employee's X account closely enough to know which hallway he is standing in.
Nvidia is selling RTX 50-series Founders Edition cards at list price, in person, at PAX West right now. That's the RTX 5090 at $1,999, the RTX 5080 at $999, and the RTX 5070 at $549, while supplies last. That last clause is doing a lot of work.
Verbatim’s AA, AAA and 9V Batteries Charge From a USB-C Cable, No Charger Needed
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Accessories, USB, Misc. Tech,
Somewhere in your house is a drawer with loose AA batteries rolling around in it, and you have no idea which ones still work. Verbatim's answer, shown off at IFA in Berlin, is to move the charging port onto the battery itself. Plug the cell into the same cable that charges your phone and wait.
The company brought AA, AAA and 9V lithium-ion cells, all of which charge over USB-C with no dedicated charger involved. The AA and AAA packs come with a multi-connector charging cable so you can top up several at once. The AAA is worth a second look, because its USB-C port runs lengthwise along the cell instead of sitting across the end, which is about the only sane way to fit a port that size on something that skinny.