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[    |    vvv        |   ]
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The dashes are the circuit board, and the “x”s are the screen. The “v”s are some tiny resistors that are the only thing that sticks out from the board where the screen is. There is a thin foam pad all along the back of the screen, but the screen appears to just sit loose in it’s place. What ends up happening is the screen rocks back and forth over the resistors. Why they designed it this way I have no idea, the only thing I can think of is that the actual production models have thinner foam or something, and once they found there was a problem it was too late to change it. I have noticed the same issue with the demo Lites at my Best Buy, but it is much less pronounced than on my import.

It doesn’t seem to impact functionality at all, but it’s the kind of thing that gets into my head and won’t let go, so I decided to fix it. I ended up making two pads of paper to slip in on either side of the resistors to brace the screen, and it works perfectly. I don’t have any movement at all now and everything still works.

Taking it apart is not too hard as long as you are careful and have a small enough tri-wing screwdriver. There are five screws on the outside, two on the left, two under the little rubber pads, and one in slot 1. There are two inside the battery compartment, one in the upper right and one in the very bottom right. The one in the center of the compartment is unnecessary to remove to take off the case. After you remove all of those, you can take off the case, be careful of the power and volume sliders that are loose. You should probably then carefully remove the shoulder buttons, they have a little spring that is likely to fly off somewhere when you are messing with the rest if you don’t. After that there are just two obvious screws that secure the circuit board to the front of the case. You can’t remove the circuit board easily, or even move it very much, but you can pry it up enough to see what’s going on and put something in there to stop the movement.

I wouldn’t do this unless you are really comfortable taking stuff like this apart and it really bugs you, but if you are the kind of person who already has a tri-wing screwdriver it’s pretty easy. Compared to installing an afterburner in the original GBA it’s very easy.

I can’t believe that MS just dropped the one feature that made them stand out. Even live will be next to useless without a hard drive to download extra content and patches to. I think Nintendo’s chances to make a market share comeback just went up quite a bit. At this point they don’t even have to do anything innovative. They just need to release a buffed up GC with wireless controllers, online play, and have it come in around $250 or less.