Yeah, I’ve tried a few different setups over the years, but had similar issues. Trying to actually hold a handheld system while on an exercise bike was the worst, with too much jiggling of the screen making it annoying to read text.
So, the recent conversation about using the Switch while exercising made me do my every-few-months check to see whether other manufacturers had jumped in on this yet. And there still aren’t any multi-platform options… but for the first time, there are actually joy-con alternatives that aren’t scaled for hobbit-sized hands!
There’s something weird going on with their availability, though, so actually getting my own hands on one was complicated. Multiple Chinese alphabet-soup-named companies all have slight variations that I assume come from the same factory, and are mostly identical.
Nyxi Hyperion
Nyxi seems to be the market leader in this tiny niche, with people raving about them on Youtube, but they only sell direct, and appeared (I’ll come back to this) to be out of stock when I checked last week. I also saw positive comments on the ones from Binbok and Doyoky, which did at one point sell on Amazon, but all their listings were marked as unavailable, with no projected return date. After some further searching, I found buried listings by Nexigo (categorized under the Legacy Systems > Nintendo DS category) and Coiorvis, each with a miniscule number of reviews, and decided to try both out, since at least returns are easy on Amazon.
While waiting for them to arrive, I checked up on Nyxi again, and discovered that the site that told me they were sold out, nyxigaming.com, is apparently the old store. It has been replaced by nyxigame.com, which sells the exact same things, but with a slightly nicer storefront, but more importantly actually has stock! Why these two storefronts aren’t connected to the same backend inventory system, and more importantly why the company left the old site live and costing them sales is beyond my feeble understanding. But I did go ahead and place an order, since it seemed like at least a slightly better bet than the two completely unheralded brands that were on the way.
Coiorvis
Skepticism aside, though, the Coiorvis pad arrived two days ago, and damned if it isn’t a real, tangible improvement over exercising with real joy-cons in a plastic grip to make them more ergonomic, as I’ve been doing the last couple years. The buttons and sticks are full-size! There’s a real d-pad instead of four little arrow buttons! Everything is spaced out from one another instead of mushed together! It basically combines the advantages of the official joy-cons (split-handed wireless, rumble, gyro controls) with the Hori Split Pad Pro I use in handheld mode (full-size grip and button layout, mappable rear paddle button, turbo mode). To the point that barring some weirdness or unreliability that hasn’t manifested in the first couple hours of usage, I would recommend it over either of those products in a heartbeat
…and yet I’m probably going to return it, because the Nexigo arrived today, and somehow it’s even better. It’s got all the same advantages of the Coiorvis pad, plus a few more minor design improvements. The sticks and buttons are nicely textured and shaped. The grip is just a bit bigger and fills my palm a bit better. The pads each have their own charging port so you can keep the rail cover with the wrist strap attached rather than having to swap onto a Switch to recharge. The T and M buttons are moved to the back where they’re out of the way of accidental presses. The rails are flush with the front of the system rather than sunken. The rumble is more refined (admittedly, that’s one area that the official joy-con is still the best). And the company appears to be reasonably established with a range of products, and provided a manual in perfectly competent English.
Nexigo
So now that I’ve thorougly hyped up the Nexigo controller and you’re all ready to buy your own… you can’t, becaues sometime in the five days since I placed my order, that Amazon listing has also become “currently unavailable” with no return in sight, following the mysterious path of Binbok and Doyoky. So as far as I can see, the Coiorvis is the only option currently on Amazon. Nexigo does sell direct, though only with somewhat garish patterns rather than the plain black I got. And the Nyxi Hyperion is still available as long as you go to the right site. I’ll see how it compares to the Nexigo when mine arrives from China in a couple of weeks. (Oh, and Nyxi also has a preorder for a GameCube-layout version that looks nice, but is three months out).
Sorry for the wall of text, but I was excited to finally solve a low-grade annoyance that has lasted for years, and hopefully this is helpful for anyone else looking at better Switch controllers.
