There were a range of third-party responses to the Nintendo 3DS’ notably short battery life , from grips to clips , to full-on battery replacements . Despite their best efforts, these products still fall in need of making the fledgling handheld international flight-ready, leaving globetrotting gamers with idle thumbs. Can’t we do better? Nyko thinks so, and promises to triple the battery lifetime of a typical 3DS with its latest accessory, the Nyko Power Grip . Other products have boasted double, but thrice the play time? Now we’re interested. We gave the Grip a run for its money — read on that allows you to know whether it is worth yours.
Hardware and installation
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Nyko’s Power Grip is a light-weight backing covered in a soft faux-rubber grip. On its front lip there is a window for the console’s headphone jack and a couple of tiny holes for the flexibility and charging LEDs to polish through. The left and right sides of grip feature labeled cutaways for the handheld’s volume and wireless controls, respectively, and the rear sports a marginally relocated charging port (now at the right side of the cartridge slot) covered in a rubberized flap. At the bottom, the grip has a couple of recessed grooves for the player’s fingers (more on that later). The plastic lips that cradle the 3DS feel strong and immovable, and looks like they might take a beating for your backpack, or in a crowded accessory drawer.
We handed the 3DS to a smaller-fingered friend, and her digits slipped right in, naturally hooking into the recessed groove.
Installation is a literal snap; simply drop the 3DS into place, push down slightly, and lock the hand-held in. The Grip hugs the console tightly, latching directly to a couple of small indentations at the handheld’s back edge. The cradle shaped backing keeps the console in a death grip, if truth be told, we needed to pry the rear latches off with our fingernails to come out the 3DS in any respect. Simply to the left of the cartridge slot, a slightly bulky nub jets out where the Grip connects to the 3DS’ charging contacts — even though it leaves the handheld’s R button fully accessible, its raised surface can prove uncomfortable for gamers who use the brink as a finger rest.
Once installed, the grip makes the hand held a few third thicker, with its supersized back making the system feel rather less cramped for gamers with larger hands. The battery’s actual “grips,” the ditch-like grooves on its underside, left us with the impression that the ability Grip wasn’t made for our meaty mitts. We handed the 3DS to a smaller-fingered friend, and her digits slipped right in, naturally hooking into the recessed groove. Although our larger hands couldn’t utilize the grip’s contours, the soft-touch back was big enough that our normal 3DS death grip worked just fine.
Performance
3 Nyko’s latest 3DS accessory will have all of the soft-touch backs and finger grooves it wants, nevertheless it has to live by the promise on its packaging: “3X the playtime vs original.” We pushed the battery backing through a lot of tests at different settings, pitting it not just against the 3DS’ stock battery, but Nyko’s own 4 Power Pak + 4 . We used Super Street Fighter VI as our test game, setting the AI to continuously attack while within the game’s training mode. Reckoning on the handheld’s settings, the Grip either broke the 3X battery barrier, dented it, or outright missed it.
Our first test was the foremost brutal — we cranked the 3DS’ brightness to max, flipped off the console’s power saving mode, enabled WiFi and turned up the handhelds 3D and Volume controls — draining the Nyko Power Grip dead after an insignificant six hours and 34 minutes. This was still a cut above the stock battery’s 2:59 runtime, or even a leg above the ability Pak+’s five and 1 / 4 hour streak, but still fell pretty faraway from the triple playtime promise.
5 Our mid-range test got us rather a lot closer. Simply dropping the brightness all the way down to medium got the Grip to nine hours and 26 minutes — still about 90 minutes wanting tripling the stock battery’s three and a half hour runtime, but close enough to make us feel like we were getting somewhere. The Grip’s real triumph came within the endurance test — after switching WiFi and volume off, killing the additional dimension, dimming brightness right down to minimum and flicking at the 3DS’ power-saving mode, the Nyko Power Grip was pushing 14 hours of playtime. We ran the test twice to be certain, and every time the battery quit within ten minutes of the fourteenth hour. The unique battery quit after four and a half hours, and the ability Pak + fell 1 / 4 hour in need of nine. Here, is where the Grip finally fulfilled its box’s promise, lasting greater than thrice so long as the 3DS’ original battery.
Unlike the facility Pak +, you will not get a reading from the 3DS as to how much charge the Nyko battery has, so long as the Grip isn’t dead (and your 3DS is fully charged), the console’s battery will read as full. While this is not a massive problem, it does make it difficult to inform how much juice the external battery has left. A red LED blinks when the Grip is reaching critical, and a green LED indicates an entire charge, but that’s your entire notification you will get. The console doesn’t appear to dip into its own battery reserves until the Grip is stone dead, and when the external unit does call it quits, you could detach it and charge it independently of the 3DS itself.
Wrap-up
6 Nyko’s 3DS Power Grip won’t universally triple your battery life, nonetheless it is defiantly able to it when every part are in place. Visual luxuries just like the handheld’s headlining three-dee feature and the screen’s higher brightness settings will handicap the external power pack, however will still provide you with enough juice to at the least double your playtime. The battery’s stylized grip grooves are a piece small for gamers with larger hands, and unit’s bulk will certainly keep your portable from your pocket. Are these flaws a deal breaker? In no way. The Nyko Power Grip knows what it really is — a battery accessory, not a battery replacement. It is a durable, mostly comfortable, grippable power cradle that’s tough enough to be idly tossed in a bag, and robust enough to get you thru your next long-haul flight.
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