Our portable devices only work if they are truly portable, and that is only achieved when you're not chained to a power supply. I use a Macbook Air for my mobile computing, and the battery life is a large part of why that system is so useful for road warriors. The iPad features a battery that easily lasts eight hours or so, even under heavy use. The Kindle? Forget about it, that thing can go for ages. Past DS units have enjoyed lengthy battery life as well, but that is not the case with the 3DS.

The battery in the Nintendo 3DS is as bad as we had feared, and it's a major impediment to enjoying the system. Here's what we've found so far, after playing with the system for a number of days.

You learn to think about the battery

When Nintendo announced that the battery life for the 3DS would be three to five hours while playing 3DS games, many people assumed that was a worst-case scenario, and you could extend that time by turning down the 3D, or the system's brightness, or turning off the wireless connection. The truth is that five hours seems to be the hard limit, and we had a very hard time even hitting that.

Why is power consumption such an issue? "[The 3DS] has to deliver separate images to the left and right eyes. Which means that in 3D the amount of light delivered to each eye is halved," 3DS system designer Ryuji Umezu said. "In order to make it look just as bright as usual, you have to increase the brightness of the backlight, which increases the power used by even more."

With the screen at a reasonable brightness, 3D and wireless turned off when the game allowed it, and no sound, we were about to get to a little over 4.5 hours of playtime. If you like a brighter screen, keep 3D turned on, or if you have that speaker going, that time is only going to go down. No matter what you do, there doesn't seem to be a way to get more than five hours of battery life if you're playing 3DS games. If you're playing older DS games the estimated battery life is five to eight hours, but we haven't tested that yet.

The takeaway is that the battery drains almost before you know it, and Nintendo is aware that this is a problem. That's why the system comes with a charging cradle, which is what you see in the image at the top of this article. You plug the power cable into the cradle, you drop your system in whenever you're done playing, and it begins to charge. It's a very convenient solution. Using the cradle whenever the system isn't being played is a habit you're going to want to pick up, especially with a charging time of around three and a half hours.

The power cable itself also seems to be slightly longer than normal, which makes it more convenient to play while having the system plugged into the wall. Sigh.

We're going to start to look at third-party peripherals that claim to extend the battery life of the 3DS very soon, because the default is a sad state of affairs. The battery is going to have a hard time keeping up with a lot of use cases. Tablet and laptop batteries have gotten to the point that we don't think about battery life that often. You'll have to think about it a lot with the 3DS.