So I just got home from work, and I was playing Nintendo Switch at work. Well, the battery died.
So I get get home, plop that bad boy in the dock. Turn on the TV, turn on my controller, and…TV has no signal, controller isn’t connecting.
I walk over, and press and hold the power button while it’s in the dock, and it’s not doing anything. I pull it out of the dock, and press the power button. It’s showing me a blank screen with a red battery symbol to indicate no battery.
Yeah, that’s fine. The dock has external power. Use that. Except, no. It’s not. I need to wait for it to charge for a few minutes. At least enough to turn it on. THEN I can run off of wall power.
I understand the BATTERY is dead. I get that. But why can’t you just draw from AC if it’s in the dock? I don’t even care if it’s charging right now. I just want to play. It can charge later when I go to sleep, and it’s just in the dock all night.
I want the switch 2 to just be drop and play, even with a dead battery. Bad enough I need to worry about if my controller is charged!
Can we bring back the WiiU controller battery life? I’m pretty sure that thing is still charged since the 1970s. Which doesn’t even make sense, but it still somehow goes to show how long that controllers battery lasted.
Maybe it’s to discourage you from discharging battery this much because if you go that far you’re damaging it.
If that’s true to any significant degree that’s an even bigger problem.
The device should be switching off with something to 5% charge remaining to prevent battery damage.
This whole post is about a person not wanting Switch to set any threshold, and let him start even at 0% battery. 😀
Not really, my reading is that they want it to bypass the battery when docked.
Their take is that the battery power is irrelevant once it has an external power supply.
Yeah, but there isn’t much of a difference in this. Power can go out, or someone can just pick it up again, so if it doesn’t have enough power to properly go in sleep/hibernate mode that can cause issue, so you have to design for those possibilities.
Anyways, I wasn’t seriously arguing about that, my point was just that different people / consumers generally want different things.
It’s the same for every Li-Ion battery powered device and I don’t think Nintendo is going to R&D new battery tech anytime soon. You’d have to sacrifice too much of a capacity to prevent it so it’s easier to just try no to go below 20% of charge. Then, if you really need to go below you can limit it to cases where you can’t just pause and resume later.
But that’s the thing, you are sacrificing the capacity its just that you are being asked to make that decision manually each and every time. They know how the drain/recharge cycles effect the battery so they could set the min/max cutoffs to optimum values.
For SSDs we expect them to over provision the storage and consider the increased longevity a measurable benefit. I don’t see why batteries should be any different.
Ideally, yes but I don’t think people want that. It’s really hard to deplete your battery as much as OP did. The issue here is that at low charge you get inaccurate measurements so you’d have to provision a lot of battery capacity and people wouldn’t buy such devices when the issue being fixed is so minor.
For “family” devices its a feature that many parents would be happy to use.
I enable the battery health options on my kid’s tablets, I’m happy to sacrifice a little bit of operating time in year one if it means I still have “near new” operating time in year two and on.
Pretty sure it’s a feature of the larger AC/battery controller, not the battery itself.
It’s more to do with chemistry and that voltage drops off sharply below 20% of charge. Once it’s there it’s also more prone to be affected by environmental factors like temperature making it even harder to measure.
A company that’s going to cut 20% battery capacity in a consumer electronics is going to lose money on sales. There are industrial solutions that do this but Nintendo makes toys that play games.