Update 10/24/2018: People are reporting that the response from Teenage Engineering on the battery life is expected. Seems the deeper issue is the previous claims of battery life compared to what people received. A user on Reddit noted that an engineer would be ‘looking into it’. Take that with a grain of salt, unless something is clearly bad it’s difficult to make battery enhancing optimizations via a firmware update.
Folks on reddit r/opzuser, operator1, (and opzed) who have started recieving their pre-order OP-Z units have a sour taste in their mouthes. The battery life is nowhere close to the advertised spec (i.e ‘cross the atlantic twice’) and the last row of buttons (step components) are mislabeled.
Battery life is 3-4 hours not 16
Pre-order customers are noting roughtly 3-4 hours of battery life even without using a screen. In our tests yesterday we also saw the battery life quickly deplete (but also charged very quickly). There’s some obvious dissapointment for people who were expecting it to last much much longer (16 hours vs 4 hours). As it stands now, the OP-1 has much more battery life even with a built in screen. Customers are left wondering how it can be so far off since the base specs were announced about 2 years ago. The Teenage Engineering website has since been updated to remove any mention of battery life on the OP-Z.
Step component buttons misprinted
Pre-order customers have also quickly realized that the OP-Z units they received have the wrong labels for step components. One user on reddit used the app and then applied each component in order to a step and noted the OP-Z app which showed each of them on screen. When lining it up there are 4 mislabeled buttons! The backlash is understandable since we are not in fact beta customers and it seems reasonable to expect the hardware to be the production version.
Really dissapointed. More soon…