Panic halts development of Playdate Stereo Dock amid challenges

Recap: It's been more than three years since Playdate maker Panic first teased a multi-purpose docking station for the quirky handheld. The aptly-named Playdate Stereo Dock was meant to serve as a charging station for the console, and double as a Bluetooth speaker (and a pen holder), but now it's unclear if the accessory will ever see the light of day.

An update on the dock's product page highlights the numerous challenges the team has faced during development, which started by assuming their manufacturing partner – with plenty of experience making Bluetooth speakers – could easily design the electronic on their behalf. Had it worked, it would have saved Panic lots of time and money.

Things went smoothly at first, but the factory ended up outsourcing the Bluetooth chipset and software to another company in a different country. Unsurprisingly, quality suffered.

Panic said the dock would crash often, especially when rapidly adjusting the volume. Pairing and unpairing was also a pain point and when music was played through the speaker, it flat out sounded bad.

Attempting to iron out the bugs while working through a middleman was a struggle, but Panic pushed forward. The company took over audio development, tweaking the equalizer to improve sound quality. They even bought the source code for the Bluetooth chipset, but the code turned out to be a mess. All the while, the cost of the project kept climbing.

As it stands today, Panic has "a number of beautiful finished prototypes" that look great but are not very good to use. Realizing that it was costing them more to make than they would ever get back from it, the team ultimately decided to hit pause on development. Bummer.

The hope is to one day reboot the project and bring the dock to the finish line but for now, there are other matters to tend to – like focusing on their new factory and resuming production of the Playdate. Perhaps a Kickstarter to rework the dock could be an option down the road?