Technologies

I Left My Heart Container in Nintendo’s San Francisco Store

Nintendo’s First West Coast Store is a Warp Pipe to Whimsy and Delightful Gamer Decor.

I’m in a group of adults slowly descending a staircase in a brightly lit white store, small gasps of joy escaping our mouths as walls of smiling squid toys come into view. Our tour guide is wrapping up his tour, and as he rattles off his last fact, he eyes the crowd. «Think you guys are ready to shop?» My reply echoes the words of former Nintendo Chief Operating Officer Reggie Fils-Aimé when he tested the Wii Board at E3 2007: My body is ready.

Japanese gaming giant Nintendo opened its first-ever West Coast store in San Francisco on Thursday — the second in the US after its New York City storefront. While it stocks lots of company merch featuring the company’s most iconic characters like Mario, Peach, Link, Zelda and way too many Pokemon, its website alludes to future events like those held at its other stores.

A few days earlier, CNET was treated to a first-hand look at all the new goodies and gadgets awaiting fans in San Francisco.

Inside the store

Set at the intersection of Geary and Powell in San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood, the first thing you notice is the parade of Nintendo characters lining the store’s windows, with Mario leading the congregation to the main doors. Upon entering the store, you’re greeted by the clean, white aesthetic that the Nintendo brand is known for.

«We want [Nintendo San Francisco] to be much more than just a store,» said Nintendo Senior Regional General Manager PJ Sadler, a manager of the NYC Nintendo store who led the tour of the new location. «We want it to be an immersive experience, we want to immerse you in our characters, with our world.»

In that spirit, a Nintendo store associate told me several Pikmin figurines were hidden throughout the store for guests to find. (I counted five; they told me there were still a few more.)

There are the requisite store exclusives, the items you can find only at the San Francisco location that set it apart from its NYC counterpart — namely, the SF-branded water bottles, T-shirts, and hoodies that say «Nintendo San Francisco.» I found those designs a little lackluster and rather sterile; I was hoping to see a little more San Francisco flair. New York City once had a collection in kanji, for example. But at least you can also find the Nintendo character parade motif adorning other San Francisco souvenirs, including exclusive minifigures and bags. Sadler noted that any products with a red Nintendo square logo indicate they can be bought only in the Nintendo US locations, either in San Francisco or New York (there were no unique marks for SF exclusives).

Also on the ground floor was a section dedicated to actual gaming equipment, including an area where customers can put together their own Nintendo Switch OLED with their choice of colored Joy-Cons and docks. (Nintendo representatives were very coy about what, if anything, would be happening at the store for the upcoming launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 on June 5.) Among the other controllers and accessories was a shelf of Nintendo Alarmo clocks, the company’s big surprise hardware launch of 2024, waiting to be taken home.

Downstairs is where they had the «big guns,» so to speak, or at least the Master Swords. Similar to Nintendo’s New York store, there are dedicated areas for Splatoon and Legend of Zelda, as well as Pikmin, Kirby, and Pokemon. There was also a giant projector screen for watching shoppers play games, alongside a giant wall of Amiibo with harder-to-find figures such as Sora from Super Smash Bros and Kingdom Hearts.

A sales associate kindly walked me through a kiosk where visitors can check in daily for Nintendo Platinum Points, which can be used for My Nintendo Rewards in the Nintendo eShop. «I just moved into a new place, so I’ve been stocking up on Animal Crossing coasters,» the associate confided.

Cozy merch forever

Though it’s been a while since I’ve been to the New York store, reconnaissance from friends and TikTok confirmed that a big theme for NY is Pokemon, featuring an almost life-size Pokemon Center where herds of Pikachu frolic on the shelves.

While Pokemon has a presence in the San Francisco counterpart (I almost walked away with a Psyduck backpack), there seems to be a greater dedication to more twee, cozy series such as Animal Crossing and Pikmin, as well as adorably subtle game decor in general.

The Animal Crossing corner featured a slew of home goods, such as an adorable cottage-core coffee grinder branded with «The Roost,» the in-game cafe headed by character Brewster the Pigeon, with a matching cup and saucer set. Other kitchen goods like an apron, glass jar set and oven mitt elicited a few squeals from me and another sales associate, who kindly pointed out the equally kawaii Animal Crossing stationery with stickers, sticky notes, notepads and character-themed pens.

Downstairs in the Legend of Zelda section, I was taken with the Zelda Fairy collection, particularly a large faux leather tote purse and fairy-themed wallets with iridescent flourishes. Lovely golden Heart Container-shaped accessories, of which not nearly enough found their way into my shopping bag, framed the scene.

Down the line, rows of enamel Kirby keychains and plush Waddle-Dees eyed me hopefully from their perches while a tower of Pikmin blind boxes and flower bud vases (successfully) tempted me from over my shoulder.

Price-wise, I was pleasantly surprised that most items weren’t egregiously expensive and more similar to pricing you’d find at a theme park. I’d expected the aforementioned coffee grinder to be somewhere around $70, but it was priced at $40. Similarly, many of the more intricately designed wallets and bags were at the $35 price or under. Pikmin blind boxes were $10. But there were still outliers — a sleek Team Rocket anorak was marked at $120, for example.

Why San Francisco? Why now?

Before 2025, Nintendo had four official stores around the world: three in Japan (Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka) and one in the US (New York). Now, San Francisco marks its fifth retail location selling merch directly to fans.

The San Francisco store’s opening comes at a pivotal time for the city’s downtown economy. Retail vacancies in San Francisco have hit record highs since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a number of flagship stores shutting down, including the Westfield San Francisco Centre and Macy’s, the former epicenter of the city’s Union Square shopping area.

When Nintendo announced the official opening plans for the store in May 2024, then-Mayor London Breed posted on X, «We’re excited for San Francisco’s future and look forward to welcoming this iconic brand to our City.»

Supervisor Danny Sauter, who represents San Francisco’s District 3, which includes Union Square, told KQED in March, «The narrative on San Francisco is starting to shift…[p]eople are willing to take a chance on San Francisco again, and it’s remarkable how that was not the case six months ago.»

Whatever the city’s reputation, fan response has been immense, with «Warp Pipe Pass» shopping visit reservations for opening week sold out in minutes, continuing on into the Memorial Day weekend. Locals have been peeking into the windows and taking pictures as soon as the signage went up. Reddit user CaterpillarFederal43 posted a picture in the San Francisco subreddit in April 2025 with his dogs in costume, noting he visits every day for a chance to use StreetPass (a peer-to-peer feature on the Nintendo 3DS) with fellow fans.

End credits

San Francisco has a legacy of gaming culture, from the former Walk of Game to the annual Game Developers Conference held in Moscone Center. Now it has a retail location and event space for one of the biggest gaming companies in the world to welcome fans.

Whether you’re a Nintendo superfan with an Isabelle-patterned sweater vest or a tourist looking for a «gamer-y» souvenir for a relative, the San Francisco Nintendo store looks like a perfect place to spend all your rupees and bells. Just watch out for mischievous Pikmin along the way.

Nintendo Store Levels Up in San Francisco: A First Look Inside the Ultimate Fan Experience

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Technologies

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Health: A Dedicated Tab for Medical Inquiries

The company wants you to upload your medical records and connect the wellness apps you use.

ChatGPT is expanding its presence in the health care realm. OpenAI said Wednesday that its popular AI chatbot will begin rolling out ChatGPT Health, a new tab dedicated to addressing all your medical inquiries. The goal of this new tab is to centralize all your medical records and provide a private area for your wellness issues.

Looking for answers about a plethora of health issues is a top use for the chatbot. According to OpenAI, «hundreds of millions of people» sign in to ChatGPT every week to ask a variety of health and wellness questions. Additionally, ChatGPT Health (currently in beta testing) will encourage you to connect any wellness apps you also use, such as Apple Health and MyFitnessPal, resulting in a more connected experience with more information about you to draw from.

Online privacy, especially in the age of AI, is a significant concern, and this announcement raises a range of questions regarding how your personal health data will be used and the safeguards that will be implemented to keep sensitive information secure — especially with the proliferation of data breaches and data brokers.

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«The US doesn’t have a general-purpose privacy law, and HIPAA only protects data held by certain people like health care providers and insurance companies,» Andrew Crawford, senior counsel for privacy and data at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in an emailed statement.

He continued: «The recent announcement by OpenAI introducing ChatGPT Health means that a number of companies not bound by HIPAA’s privacy protections will be collecting, sharing and using people’s health data. And since it’s up to each company to set the rules for how health data is collected, used, shared and stored, inadequate data protections and policies can put sensitive health information in real danger.»

OpenAI says the new tab will have a separate chat history and a memory feature that can keep your health chat history separate from the rest of your ChatGPT usage.

Further protections, such as encryption and multifactor authentication, will defend your data and keep it secure, the company says. Health conversations won’t be used to train the chatbot, according to the company.

Privacy issues aside, another concern is how people intend to use ChatGPT Health. OpenAI’s blog post states the service «is not intended for diagnosis or treatment.»

The slope is slippery here. In August 2025, a man was hospitalized after allegedly being advised by the AI chatbot to replace salt in his diet with sodium bromide. There are other examples of AI providing incorrect and potentially harmful advice to individuals, leading to hospitalization.

OpenAI’s announcement also doesn’t touch on mental health concerns, but a blog post from October 2025 says the company is working to strengthen its responses in sensitive conversations. Whether these mental health guardrails will be enough to keep people safe remains to be seen.

OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

If you’re interested in ChatGPT Health, you can join a waitlist, as the tab isn’t yet live.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Technologies

I Tested the Honor Magic 8 Pro and Found a Huge Problem With the Camera

I discovered a catastrophic problem with this phone’s cameras and it needs to be fixed fast.

I’ve found a big problem with the Honor Magic 8 Pro’s camera that urgently needs addressing. I’ve taken hundreds of test photos in my weeks with the company’s latest flagship phone, and while plenty of them are perfectly decent, many of the images I’ve taken with the ultrawide lens display horrendous image processing issues around the edges that ruin them completely.

I discovered the issue when I first got the phone late last year, and while it’s had several significant software updates since then, the problems persist. So what’s gone wrong? It’s possible that I’m monumentally unlucky and happen to have been given a broken unit. If so, I fully expect the replacement models I’ll be testing to be free of any issues. Or, maybe it’s a more widespread problem and I’ll see the same issues cropping up again. I personally think it’s more likely to be an issue at the software level, and as such, it could be a simple fix for Honor to push out in the coming days and weeks.

I’ve spoken to Honor about this and, unsurprisingly, the company is keen to say that this isn’t widespread, stating «Our internal investigation confirmed that the issue was limited to an isolated hardware anomaly in that specific early development sample. It doesn’t reflect the hardware or software polish of the final retail units now launching in the European market.» And sure, my test unit was an early non-EU version, but it is also the phone that the company did send me to review. Receiving early prerelease samples is common in the industry and while small hiccups can sometimes be expected, I rarely find such significant problems as this.

Honor is sending additional retail units for further testing and I hope that I’m able to confirm that this isn’t an issue seen on all models. I was prepared to write a full review of this new flagship phone, but these camera issues are severe and raise more questions than answers. I will update this article with more information and my testing results as they become available.

Read more: Best Phone to Buy in 2026

Even if it is an isolated incident, it’s still disappointing to see such significant problems on a new phone, especially a flagship that costs £1,099 in the UK. Honor doesn’t officially sell its phones in the US, but for reference, that price converts to roughly $1,480.

The phone does have some positives. I like its processor performance and display, for example, which I’ll come on to later. But the camera issues I’ve seen mean I can’t recommend buying this phone until it’s clear whether they’re limited to my review device or if they’re issues common across all models.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on.

Honor Magic 8 Pro camera troubles

Taken with the camera’s standard zoom, the shot above is fine — there’s a decent amount of detail and the exposure is even overall.

But switch to the ultrawide mode and things go horribly wrong. There’s a vibrant purple fringe around the edge that’s full of image processing artifacts that ruin the shot.

It’s not a subtle problem; it’s a huge red flag that something is very wrong with this phone.

For reference, here’s the iPhone 16 Pro’s ultrawide shot. Notice the difference?

As you can see, it’s not an isolated incident. It seems to be more apparent when there are areas of shadow in the edges. It makes me suspect that the phone is seeing these dark patches and trying — and failing — to brighten them and add detail back into the scene. It’s not dissimilar to the early problems I found on Google’s Pixel 8 Pro, which also struggled with shadow detail, suggesting to me that this is a software fault, rather than a mechanical problem with my unit.

It also doesn’t seem to affect the ultrawide lens when recording video, which again suggests it’s not a hardware issue as I’d expect to see the same problems from the lens in any mode. The downside of that is that it could theoretically affect all models of the Honor Magic 8 Pro. However, the big upside is that software problems can be easily remedied with over-the-air updates.

To be honest, I don’t love the camera elsewhere, either. The image processing has gone overboard in this image, brightening the shadows and trying to rescue the highlights in the background excessively. It’s resulted in an over-processed image that looks unnatural.

The iPhone 16 Pro’s attempt has allowed those shadows to remain what they are — shadows — and I vastly prefer this version as a result.

I’ve also noticed that there can be significant color shifts when switching between the main and ultrawide lenses, which I would again prefer not to see on a camera phone of this price.

However, this could be attributed to the same software processing issues I’ve already discussed, so I’ll have to leave my verdict on the camera for when I’ve done more testing.

On the upside, this shot of the Tennents brewery in Glasgow looks good.

And I like the colors and tones in this sunset scene in Edinburgh. So it’s not all bad — it can take a decent photo sometimes. So what about the rest of the phone?

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Display, performance and battery life

I like the phone’s 6.71-inch display, which is bright and vibrant. It’s lovely for gaming, too, thanks to its max 120Hz refresh rate. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 processor, which puts in some of the best scores we’ve ever seen on our benchmark tests for both processor performance and graphics processing.

It certainly feels nippy in everyday use. Games like Genshin Impact, unsurprisingly, played smoothly at max graphics settings. The phone runs on a 6,270-mAh battery, which, while sizable, only gave average results on our battery drain tests. Battery performance sits alongside phones like the Galaxy S25 or Google Pixel 10, but it’s a big step below the iPhone 17 Pro Max or OnePlus 15.

If it feels like I’m glossing over the rest of the phone somewhat, it’s because I am. With the issues I’ve seen so far, it’s possible that there may be other early teething troubles elsewhere, so I’m going to hold off giving any kind of definitive verdict on any part of the phone until I’ve tested more models and have a full appreciation of what the phone is really like to use.

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Should you buy it?

Right now, I absolutely don’t think you should. The issues I’ve seen with the camera are significant and badly need addressing. It could be that it’s a simple software fix that can be rolled out in the coming weeks, or it might be an isolated incident that affects me and me alone. I’ll be retesting on multiple devices and it could be that they’re absolutely fine.

But unless you’re desperate for a new phone today and you absolutely have to have an Honor phone, then I recommend waiting until we’ve got more clarity about how deep these problems lie.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Jan. 8 #676

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Jan. 8, No. 676.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle was almost impossible for me, because it’s all focused on a certain TV show that I have never watched and barely know anything about. (Its fourth season premieres today, if you want to check it out.) If you’re like me, you need hints and answers, so read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: That’s just reality (TV)

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Show with plenty of trickery.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

SIDE, HIDE, START, TART, FAITH, TENS, BANS, FATE, SILT, CAST, TRAIT

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

CASTLE, SHIELD, MISSION, FAITHFUL, BANISHMENT

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is THETRAITORS. To find it, start with the T that’s three letters down on the far-left row, and wind across and then down.

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