We now know why the DualSense Edge’s battery life is so poor

If you’re wondering why your DualSense Edge battery’s not lasting as long as you’d like, it turns out there’s a very straightforward reason for it.

A teardown of the DualSense Edge controller, done by verified Twitter user Budd’s Controllers, shows that the battery in Sony’s premium pad is considerably smaller than that of the standard DualSense.

But it’s not just the size that’s smaller here, as the premium PS5 controller’s battery capacity is also significantly less than that of the regular DualSense. The Edge has a battery capacity of just 1,050mAh. That’s a substantial downgrade when compared to the 2020 DualSense’s 1,560mAh, Dexerto reports).

This evidence lines up with official wording from Sony, who says the DualSense Edge’s battery life was “moderately shorter” than that of its base model. Furthermore, in my own testing of the DualSense Edge for our review, I found the controller’s battery life to deplete from full after roughly seven hours of play.

Depending on what you play and how intensely the games use the DualSense’s features, such as its adaptive triggers and haptic feedback, the battery life will vary. Though, it appears that you won’t get much more than six to seven hours out of the Edge before needing to charge it up again. The pack-in DualSense certainly fares better, clocking around eight to ten hours, on average, before running out of juice.

Why is the DualSense Edge’s battery so poor?

The DualSense Edge is a slight improvement over the base pad in all areas but one: its battery life. And we now know why that is. But what would cause Sony to consciously downgrade the battery life, when you’d think it’d want the Edge firing on all cylinders, given its lofty price tag?

My immediate guesses are space and cost-saving. You can see from the image above just how cramped the innards of the DualSense Edge have to be to contain all of the components of the original DualSense, and the addition of two Function buttons, trigger locks, and four ports for rear paddles. It may be Sony’s engineers decided the extra functionality was worth the loss in battery life.

On the cost-saving front, the DualSense Edge packs a premium price, $199.99 / £209.99 / AU$339.95 to be exact. And that’s with the smaller battery. A DualSense battery pack or larger may have necessitated an even larger price tag, making it even less palatable. Especially when compared to the standard DualSense.

Manufacturing a smaller and cheaper battery is certainly one way of cutting down development costs. But whatever the reason may be, the Edge’s poor battery life isn’t exactly fitting of its ‘Pro’ controller status. Especially when competing pads like the Xbox Elite Controller Series 2 and the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, are easily clocking tens of hours of battery life in comparison.

Thanks to the PS5 controller, you really feel the dismemberment in Dead Space