GuliKit has put a revised version of its anti-drift thumbsticks into a wireless controller for the first time. The ES Max is available now at $49.99 — up from the $29.99 the budget ES Pro launched at roughly a year ago, and still below what Nintendo charges for the Switch 2 Pro Controller.
The interesting part is the change in how the sticks work. Both generations use tunneling magnetoresistance, which does away with the physical contact responsible for the drift that plagued the original Switch. What differs is what gets measured.
Conventional TMR watches a magnet move nearer to and further from a sensor, and reads the change in field strength. The weakness there is built in: as the magnet retreats, the signal the sensor is trying to read gets fainter. GuliKit's revision instead has the sensor track the rotational angle of the magnet as it turns along with the stick. Field strength stays constant throughout, so accuracy holds across the full range of travel — which the company translates into sticks that are more precise, more responsive and more stable.
It is not a reinvention of the underlying technology so much as a better decision about what to sample, which is where this class of improvement usually comes from.
The rest of the specification is conventional enough for the money. Two remappable buttons sit on the back, the thumbstick caps can be swapped, and the Hall-effect linear triggers convert to micro-switches when you want shorter travel and a quicker response. GuliKit bundles its Hyperlink 2 Bluetooth adapter, claiming lower latency over wireless, and has shipped its first mobile app for configuring and updating its gamepads.
Compatibility is broad: every version of the Switch, Windows and macOS machines, iOS and Android devices, and Steam.
