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.
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.