For comparison, the Nintendo Switch has a clock speed ten times higher (approximately 1.7GHz) and 2,000 times as much memory (32GB).
Internally, the Playdate features a 168MHz Cortex M7 chip with 16MB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, along with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. This means you won’t be able to see it at all in the dark, and while it looks good in the sun, you must carefully angle the Playdate to avoid glare. There is no backlight, and the screen is quite reflective. However, that nostalgia only goes so far, and while the LCD looks quite clean, you’ll still have a hard time looking at it in many conditions. This is its own unique device closer in spirit to the Game Boy than those other devices. Smartphones almost universally have much higher resolutions, and often higher pixel density, but this is clearly not intended to compete with them, the Nintendo Switch, or the Steam Deck. At 400 by 240, it has four times the pixels of the original Game Boy (160 by 144), and looks nice and crisp in that context. The Playdate’s screen might lack color and rely on dithering to produce grays since it’s purely monochrome rather than grayscale, but it’s very sharp. Even with the Game Boy-like layout, the Playdate looks wholly unique and feels like a premium device, all while remaining accessible and friendly.
Panic says that the battery provides eight hours of active power (or 14 days in standby mode as a clock).Īll of these physical elements are immaculately neat, thanks to Teenage Engineering (makers of the Pocket Operator portable synthesizers). Despite making the Playdate resemble an emergency radio, the crank does not charge the battery. You can also crank it up and down to navigate menus, if you don’t want to use the direction pad. It’s a rotary input for the device, providing single-axis analog control for Playdate games. A metal arm mounted to the Playdate’s midpoint folds out from its resting position to reveal a yellow, plastic tab. These are presumably mounting holes for the optional stereo dock and cover.Īnd then there’s the crank. A fourth grommet sits behind the screen, on the top-left corner. Metal grommets sit on the Playdate’s top-right, bottom-left, and bottom-right corners, and extend through the system’s body. The top edge houses a power button, while the bottom edge holds a USB-C port for charging, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and holes for the built-in microphone.
Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. (Read our editorial mission.) Game Boy-style controls, consisting of a direction pad and A and B face buttons, sit below the screen.
It features a 2.7-inch, 400-by-240 monochrome LCD screen that’s slightly offset to the left, with a small speaker grille and menu button to the right of it. It’s a scant 0.4 inches thick, including the direction pad and face buttons sticking out from the front panel. The Playdate is an odd, but friendly-looking little device a 3-inch, yellow, plastic square with rounded corners. The Playdate’s utterly fascinating as a piece of concept tech and a development playground, but considering its limited power and library, the $180 device is too expensive. It’s tiny, it’s square, it’s monochrome, it has a crank, and its RAM can be measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. And then there’s Panic Inc.’s Playdate, which runs completely in the opposite direction. The Nintendo Switch is an example, as is the Steam Deck. Gaming handhelds usually focus on packing as much power and functionality as possible into a standard form factor consisting of a wide, color screen flanked by dual analog controls.