I've only owned it a short time, so I can't speak to the longevity. Ask this question again in two years and I'll have more information with which to evaluate.
Based on my experience so far, I would say it is a very cool controller, but lacking in a couple of very important aspects. The most obvious is battery life and the lack of a replaceable battery. If you could swap batteries easily, the poor battery life wouldn't be such a big deal. But you cannot, so the bad battery life is a big deal. And the battery life really, really sucks.
The other big miss in my mind is the quality of the speaker. I think it's a really cool idea that helps with immersion into the games. But, it's simply doesn't output enough volume. It is probably fine if you're just playing through TV speakers. But, many of us are playing on home theater systems. The controller speaker is drowned out even when the AV system is at a moderate volume and the controller speaker is cranked to the max. Similarly, because it's such a small speaker, it can't really do anything except high frequencies. So, I'd like to see some improvement to the speaker whenever they refresh the controller design. It's going to have to stay very small, so there's probably not much they can do to improve the mid-range response. But, they can definitely work on the volume.
I think the adaptive triggers are great, as is the haptic feedback. The light is better than the dualshock 4, as it doesn't bother me much while playing. It is a little bit big and bulky, but I don't think there's anything they can do about that with all the features they've put in it.
Overall, I'll give it a 4 out of five. I'm tempted to say three out of five because of the garbage battery life and unreplaceable nature. But, as long as it keeps working well for a while, I think it's good enough to get a 4.
Also, I don't understand why they put another touchpad after there was almost no worthwhile utilization of it on the dual shock 4. Get that thing out of there to reduce size and weight and bring the cost down, and put those resources into a better speaker and battery.
Last edited by VAMatt - on 27 December 2022
