I suppose I should have written: R&D mode may cause the battery to be drained at a higher rate and should be disabled in order to eliminate it as the source of the problem. Please see "Battery drain with Diablo 4.2008.23-14".

By itself R&D mode shouldn't cause problems, but if any software on your tablet happens to use the R&D mode flag to enable debugging or otherwise change behaviour, battery life could suffer. Along those lines, there have been reports on the mailing lists, in Bugzilla, and in the forums of tablets miraculously regaining good battery runtimes once R&D mode is disabled.