Except for the Switch OLED, it seems that other handheld consoles that were supposed to ship this year all bumped into some problems.
Yesterday we were just informed that Steam Deck has been delayed to 2022 - which was disappointing enough - now, it's Panic's turn to announce bad news.
It's been confirmed that Playdate's first batch of shipments has also been delayed from late 2021 to early 2022. According to Panic, this is because of some battery issues they found while they were testing the goods:
"[...]We quickly became concerned that some of them weren't giving us the battery life we expected. Playdate's battery is designed to last a very long time, and always be ready for you, even if not used for a while. But that was not the case: in fact, we found a number of units with batteries so drained, Playdate wouldn't power on at all — and couldn't be charged. That's a battery worst-case scenario."
In order to fix the problem, they even shipped 5,000 finished Playdates back to Malaysia to be given new batteries. Now, they've found a new supplier, and the new batteries will be in place soon. But due to this reason, they have to push back the shipments.
Of course, for a lot of people, they would have to wait until 2022 anyway since the initial batch of 20,000 units sold out real quick.
For more details and information, check the full statement here.