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3DS Battery Life Fully Detailed By Nintendo
- Thread starter A Black Falcon
- Start date
Ding said:
we have the teardown of the 3DS. It really does come down to unit size being the issue. Its why I think the first revision will be a 3DS XL. They admitted in the latest Iwata Asks that they used all their knowledge to make it as small as possible though I do agree that I think larger would have been acceptable as they even made it a tad smaller than the DSi
As we can see there the metal casing in the top space is all the room for the battery.It seems the whole reason for it being thicker is to make room for the battery as the stuffing is jammed in
Hcoregamer00 said:Like my PSP-1000
My battery is in such a bad state that the console dies in 10 minutes. My console is pretty much a "home console" since it cannot be played with out being plugged in.
I just bought another battery for about $10 for my PSPhat. That was like a year and a half ago. Now I'm actually worried that I won't be able to do the same with the PSP2.
Father_Brain
Banned
Out of curiosity, how much battery life would be saved if a (hypothetical) future model switched to OLED screens?
ViperVisor
Member
Too much invective in here.
This is less convenience for a product that is centered around the concept.
But the % of consumers who can't adjust is small. More than 10min of every hour awake a day playing is a select group.
Sometimes you may be in that situation.
Nintendo Store description for $15 DS battery. Need a backup battery for that long road trip?
This is less convenience for a product that is centered around the concept.
But the % of consumers who can't adjust is small. More than 10min of every hour awake a day playing is a select group.
Sometimes you may be in that situation.
Nintendo Store description for $15 DS battery. Need a backup battery for that long road trip?
Ding said:
the 3DS is about the size of a DSi (or was it Lite?). the battery is higher capacity though. I believe the Lite had a 1000mAh battery and the 3DS has a 1300mAh battery. To put that into perspective, the ipod touch 4g has a 930mAh battery, and an iphone 4 has a 1420mAh battery
Billychu said:
I hope people begin to realize that this is the price we pay for systems this powerful on the go with the current level of battery technology.
Companies are fighting against a wall here. In order to maintain a portable size, you can only increase the size of the internal battery to a certain point. And that battery is only going to be a certain level of power as dictated by the limitations in all battery technology.
Unless people start proposing we halt all handheld advancing, we're literally shit out of luck - the piddling differences in power saving techniques will help somewhat in the short term, but it's a losing battle.
The ONLY way this is going to significantly change from here on out is if someone comes up with a feasible mass market battery solution that is better than what we have and smaller than what we have.
There are a couple in the pipeline that are reasonably promising, but it's still a ways off to be in mass market and there's nothing anyone can do until it comes.
People have to STOP blaming Nintendo and Sony at this point.
SatelliteOfLove
Member
Mush said:
I figure I'll wait till purple. Then it'll have a revision with good battery life (and probably a shitton of games!)
Souldriver
Member
Battery life is pretty terrible. I'll wait for some reviews from actual gamers and technology/gaming sites before making my final judgement, but bad battery life is definitely a breaking point for me.
I want my portable to be portable. More than anything else.
I want my portable to be portable. More than anything else.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
For those saying that they could've put in a bigger battery. Not only would that have increased the size and cost of the machine, but it would have also increased the charge time of the battery as well (and here people are already complaining about having it take 3.5 hours to charge!)
There's no real happy medium sadly (Though a 3DSXL is a possibility...)
There's no real happy medium sadly (Though a 3DSXL is a possibility...)
Amir0x said:
It's their decision. If they cant develop hardware that is efficient enough to provide a decent battery life then fuck them
the iphone i much smaller and has better graphics, yet it has a comparable battery life.
nintendo deserve a lot of grief for their shitty design decisions with the 3DS, and the battery life isn't even the worst one
PeakPointMatrix
Member
Isn't this the limit of lithium batteries? As in, we're not gonna see any major improvements in battery life anytime soon?
Yes there has not been a massive battery breakthrough thats reached mainstream in many years now.SwiftSketcher said:
The only way to get longer life is a larger battery which in turn means larger devices. The Ipad for instance has 2 batteries that are each larger than an Iphone
phisheep
NeoGAF's Chief Barrister
Amir0x said:
Indeed. We've had this with cameras for years. Pretty well every serious camera is either hugely big or there's an option extra battery pack for it, and that goes back about as far as I can remember having a camera that needed batteries (1970's sometime).
Now, if that charging cradle for the 3DS actually clips onto the machine and has an extra battery inside it we might be talking reality here.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
Amir0x said:
Yeah yeah laugh it up. That was based on the assumption that the figures were assuming lowest brightness (with the 2 hour range being for WiFi on or off), an assumption that turned out to be wrong.
That was also before we found out that the Parralax Barrier screen halfs the brightness from the backlight (which had been speculated but not confirmed).
Or are you seriously suggesting that a larger battery would not take longer to charge?
I'd like to pretend to be outraged about the low battery life of 3DS/NGP but rarely do I actually use handhelds for their intended purpose (take them with me on the go). Also when I do take them with me I rarely am away from a charger for longer than 5 hours. So this doesn't really bother me. Sucks for those that it inconveniences though :/.
Jamesfrom818
Banned
Amir0x said:
Its not even in the best interest for battery manufacturers to come up with better tech. Why make something that will last significantly longer and take more charge cycles? It'll just eat into their sales. Kinda like how its in the pharmaceutical industry's best interest to create treatments, rather than cures.
friskykillface
Banned
That's what I was thinking.KaYotiX said:
I only played my dsi about an hour max, two hours straight very rarely.
I'm fine with the 3DS battery life span.
Though I'll look into buying a 3rd party Bat for a back up.
Me_Marcadet
Member
I don't understand how you can get those numbers with the infos from iwata laughs.
He says 3h at max setting.
10-20% more if you turn on power save, so in best case scenario it's 3h36 .
25% more if you turn 3d off so it means 4h30.
If we add those 25% to the 5h at low brightness, we have 6h15.
They say wifi doesn't have a significant impact in most games so I don't think we could add the 10% to the figures we got.
If I'm good at maths we have :
3d on, max brightness : 3h
3d on, max brightness power save on : 3h36
3d on, low brightness : 5h
3d off, max brightness : 3h45
3d off, max brightness, power save on : 4h30
3d off, low brightness : 6h15
Please show me where I'm wrong and how you can get 8h battery life.
I can't say I'm as disappointed as some of you here since I rarely commute for longer than 3 hours at a time (my bus ride from dorms to home is 3 hours on the dot, and the bus tends to be fairly dark inside), but this is just showing the direction handhelds are being forced to go. The capacity for more processing power is there, but the battery life to support it isn't. I haven't been reading up on the PSP2, but from the sounds of things its life will be about the same.
On a related note, how does the DSi XL feel in one's hands? The only way battery life can be increased is if there is some breakthrough in battery tech, the components inside become much more efficient, or the 3DS revision will be bigger. If it was DSi XL size, or even a bit smaller, it could potentially raise the battery life by 50%, judging from the DSi -> XL change.
On a related note, how does the DSi XL feel in one's hands? The only way battery life can be increased is if there is some breakthrough in battery tech, the components inside become much more efficient, or the 3DS revision will be bigger. If it was DSi XL size, or even a bit smaller, it could potentially raise the battery life by 50%, judging from the DSi -> XL change.
Holy Order Sol
Member
Amir0x said:
I'd say that the PSP being successful despite similar issues (at least in the beginning) was also interpreted as people not thinking of battery life as a priority, at least not as much as before. Provided it's not something ridiculous like the Game Gear it won't make or break a system.
ZeroGravity
Member
Seriously. This is a pretty big non-issue.KaYotiX said:
GoldenEye 007
Member
Yup. I wish more people knew this. OLEDs are amazing for dark colors and blacks. That is basically why I love them and would prefer them on my phones and other devices. The power saving is cool on dark colors too. But that savings is basically erased and then some when you display brighter colors and white.antonz said:
Jamesfrom818
Banned
For me, the battery life will only be an issue on cross country flights but I'll probably have my netbook with me too.
What a load of nonsense.Nuclear Muffin said:
Doubling the 3DS's battery size, (assuming they designed it that way from the beginning) would have added less than $3 to the parts cost, and a tiny bit of extra weight and heft.
And with the right power supply, virtually any lithium battery (right up to the 700 lb. ones found in electric cars) can be charged in one hour flat. (That's called a "1C" charge rate.) The only variable that changes as the battery size increases is the number of amps you need to supply to the battery while it charges.
(While almost all batteries of this type can handle a one hour charge, I can see limiting yourself to half that, if you wanted to be extra conservative. A 0.5C charge rate would require 2 hours, of course.
I guess the 3DS has a 1,300mAh battery? Let's pretend Nintendo put a 3,000mAh battery in there instead, and crunch those numbers.
3,000 milliamp hours is the same as 3 amp hours. To recharge a completely dead 3Ah battery all the way to full in one hour requires.... 3 amps!
How much wattage is that? We need to know the voltage of the cells to work that out. I think these run about 3.3V, but I could be wrong. Let's pretend I'm not.
3.3V * 3A = 9.9 watts.
Designing a 10W "AC adapter" ain't rocket science. However, it's gotten popular to charge small devices using a USB connection, and those don't push many watts at all. A "good" USB port will supply you 1A at 5V. 5 watts, in other words.
So, if Nintendo more than doubled the size of the battery in the 3DS, and decided to limit themselves to a 0.5C charge rate, and decided to only allow the charger to be powered by a weedy little USB port, and the battery was run all the way down.... It would only take 2 hours to recharge it fully.
If it indeed takes 3.5 hours to charge a battery half that size, that just means N chose to do it that way for some inscrutable reason. It has fuck-all to do with the actual size of the battery.
antonz said:
There are in fact two ways to get better battery life out of a device, assuming that batteries never increase in power-density again:
- Use a bigger battery. (This has drawbacks in terms of size and weight.)
- Make the device draw less power per hour. (This has drawbacks in terms of performance and cost.)
Right now, it sounds like the main power sucker in the 3DS are the backlights. In particular, the backlight behind the 3D screen. Can you make backlights more efficient and frugal of power? Yes! In fact, that's an area where tech is improving quite quickly and continuously.
I assume that Nintendo is using LED backlighting? (If they aren't, they're either stupid, or insanely cheap. I'm pretty sure they're not stupid.) So, if Nintendo wanted to improve battery life without adding more batteries, all they'd need to do is use more efficient LEDs in their backlights. Could they in fact do this? Almost certainly. It's very doubtful that they are using the most super efficient (and expensive) LEDs in existence right now.
But that sort of thing is expensive. And while customers like tiny devices that are powerful and run for many hours on a charge, they also like cheap.
Small. Powerful. Cheap. Long lasting batteries.
Pick any two. You can't ever have all three. Four is completely out of the question. Stop asking. : ) The trick is deciding where to compromise.
Of course the GPU is a minor draw on the overall power consumption of each device, but the differing selections there reflect which company actually knew best what it was doing with the rest of their system design.
Computing has shifted mobile, so the demand is there for functionality and performance. The market is willing to accept a somewhat higher pricing range now for these gadgets, and the NGP has been quite conservative with its bill of materials, anyway.
Computing has shifted mobile, so the demand is there for functionality and performance. The market is willing to accept a somewhat higher pricing range now for these gadgets, and the NGP has been quite conservative with its bill of materials, anyway.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
In case you hate to hook a wire into your system, now you can hook a wire into something you lay the system on. Massive difference.Keru_Shiri said: