Review: Playdate
I’m a sucker for handhelds. A portable system with a crank, packed with indie games? The Playdate had me at hello.
But for a lot of people, $180 is going to be a tough sell. Let’s go on that journey together.
The Playdate box comes with the system (which has a sleep/wake button on top, a menu button, a d-pad, B and A buttons, a 3-Axis accelerometer, and a crank, more on that later), a USB C to USB A charging cable, and a little paper starter guide: what you see above is the entire shebang taken out of the form factor box.
The hardware sports a 400×240, 1-bit display, measuring 76 × 74 × 9 mm. Included is a 168 MHz Cortex M7 CPU, 16MB RAM, 32 KB L1Cache, 4 GB Flash, with support for 802.11bgn 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The onboard sound is a built-in mono speaker, with a stereo headphone jack, and a condenser mic + TRSS mic in. It has an eight-hour active (14-day standby) battery life. With all 24 season 1 games installed, I had 2.6GB free of the included 4GB, just to give you an idea of how much space you’ll have to work with (games range from less than 1MB to over 100MB at the top-end).
Setting up was super simple, and out of the box into playing my first game, it took around 10 minutes. After starting up the Playdate, you’ll be asked to register your device on any browser by logging in and inputting the on-screen PIN (there’s even a QR code to scan on the device). I was already signed in, so I put in the code like I was authorizing a streaming service device and I was on my way. The first two games (Casual Birder and Whitewater Wipeout) downloaded and installed quickly.
While the Playdate has no backlight, I was surprised at how little light it needed to show a clear picture, and how good it looks in natural light
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