More 3DS battery life details from Nintendo

A few weeks ago, Nintendo announced that the 3DS’ battery life will last three to five hours – much to the disappointment of fans. At the time, it wasn’t clear if certain features had more of an effect than others, and if turning particular settings off would increase the battery life at all. It seems as though the brightness setting for the 3DS screens will have the biggest impact, based on information from the latest Iwata Asks. Ryuji Umezu, Satoru Iwata, and Hideki Konno shared the following information:

Umezu: We announced the other day that the battery duration for playing Nintendo 3DS games on it is about three to five hours. When I measured it by playing several Nintendo games, with the backlight set to the brightest level and the power save mode turned off, battery duration was about three hours. But if you use the power save mode under the same conditions, it gets about 10-20% longer. And if you set the backlight to the darkest setting, the battery lasts five hours, but the power save mode makes less of a difference then.

Iwata: In other words, the brightness of the backlight has the greatest effect on battery duration.

Umezu: Right. What’s more, with the backlight set as high as it will go, battery life changes about 25% according to whether you’re playing in 2D or 3D.

Iwata: Yes, 3D is a battle against power use. How about wireless use? Some players may be worried about that.

Umezu: In StreetPass mode, the system isn’t always communicating, so there isn’t much of a drain on the battery, but games that communicate a lot through local play and online play—with the backlight set to high—have an over 10% effect on the battery.

Iwata: So it will be necessary for this system to be charged more often than for the previous systems. For that reason, we include a special charging cradle. We recommend that when players get home, they put their system there.

Another challenge we faced this time, after adopting the 3D LCD, is how it will look different to different people. The space between people’s eyes differs, among other individual differences.

Konno: Yes. We solved that with the 3D Depth Slider, which allows you to adjust the 3D effect.