GOPRO HERO 9 BLACK GETS WELCOME UPDATE

oPro Hero 9 Black firmware update has finally improved the action cam’s frustratingly sluggish touchscreen – and also delivers new open source tools that should see the camera play nice with other tech.

The Hero 9 Black’s v1.6 update, which is available to download via the Quik app, brings several tweaks, but the main one is that it “improves touchscreen performance in menus and settings”.

So does it actually fix the action camera’s annoyingly unresponsive screen? Not completely, by the sounds of it, with users reporting that while it’s

Geasier to pull down the settings menu, and scrolling through preferences feels snappier, there’s still some slight lag in places compared to the screen on the Hero 8 Black. It isn’t a deal-breaker, and the Hero 9 Black is still a superb action camera, but it’s a little frustrating that the Hero 8 Black still offers a slightly smoother experience.

Arguably the bigger feature of the Hero 9 Black’s firmware update, though, is its compatibility with the new ‘Open GoPro’ platform, which is a new API (Application Programming Interface) for developers to get their teeth into.

This allows anyone with some coding knowledge to write software that interacts with or controls certain aspects of the GoPro Hero 9 Black. Not everything is available to developers – for example, there’s no access to the action cam’s video feed – but tinkerers will be able to access the camera’s wireless connectivity, video preview, status and SD card transfer.

It’s early days for the API, but it does mean that you can expect to see much better integration with other hardware, like smartwatches and bike computers, and with other software.