Since 2.1.0 battery on both my Playdate have been acting up. If I leave the console alone, fully charged, it depletes down to 80% within a day. It’s a novel behavior that I never saw before, and it affects equally both my units. 2.1.1 didn’t fix the issue. Anyone else noticed this?
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I actually noticed this as well. For example just the other day the playdate was showing it was critically low. After I left it to charge for ~15 min, it said it's at 80%. That's not enough time for it to charge up to 80%
Yes same here. It seems like the charge level indicated is wrong, and fluctuates wildly. It’s quite the issue, so I’m surprised that not more people attest to that. It could be a rare bug affecting only a fraction of consoles, but then I got particularly unlucky since both mine demonstrate the problem.
I have the first generation console. Are yours both first generation?
Yes both mine are first generation.
I want to add more observations. One of the Playdate was at 86%. I charged it for 10 minutes and it was back at 100%. I left the console alone for 10 minutes and it’s now back to 92%. Before 2.1.0, I could leave the console sleeping for 24 hours and it would lose 1 or 2%.
Can we have someone from Playdate intervening here and telling us what they think?
It's also happening with my first gen developer preview device.
I unplugged it and just moving around the system menu I can watch the battery drop visually. (I don't know where to look to see the exact percentage.)
Yes there's really something up. At least it's consistent because both my first gen Playdate are having the issue. The thing that I'm not sure is if it's the battery depleting really fast or just the charge level giving the wrong reading. It's quite the problem though so I hope that the developers are aware and looking into this.
Another observation is that if I turn off my console (hold down the top button) after a week of being off the console's batter drops to under 50%. If I leave the console powered off for another week the battery is critical. It should stay 14 days on standby clock, although I would guess if the system is off that it uses very little power.
I observe jumpy battery indicator behaviour as well. I believe I saw it before 2.1.0 too. I own Rev B.
I don't use Playdate a lot these days, so it sits on my desk for about a week until new Season 1 games come out. Last week the menu indicator constantly suggested I plug the console. Ironically, that indicator disappeared after I played 5 minutes with new games!
I basically stop trusting the indicator and charge the console only when it's actually begging to do so (or goes dark). A Playdate developer once mentioned here that having a stable reliable battery charge percent value is a hard problem.