Can one rant about Wear OS here since it’s technically still Android?
When Samsung was making watches on Tizen, they released products like Frontier (boasting upto 3 day battery life), original Galaxy Watch (boasting upto 4 days battery life). Cue they switched to Wear OS with GW4 and with the 40mm variant, the battery life doggedly remained at a pathetic 1 day with AOD on.
Even with release of newer generations like Ultra, they are barely hitting 3 days with ~590mAh battery. Why is Wear OS such a battery hog?
I own a Galaxy Watch 6 and the watch OS uses like 6 GB storage and 1+ GB in perpetual RAM. Is it really so that displaying time and running couple of apps in the background takes more memory than GNOME 46?
I bought a wear os watch deliberately because I thought I would enjoy modifying and customizing it like a regular android phone. In reality, I don’t use it much more than for fitness tracking. I’m going to buy a garmin instinct and not change for the next 4 years.
I have a solar powered Garmin with all the biometrics and all the GPS protocols for every satellite system known to man, and a full map feature, same as any WearOS device is capable of, with zero installable apps; the watch lasts 21 days from a full charge.
I use it to tell me the time, reply to texts and track my workouts. Not sure the point of an entire linux kernel requiring to be run on other watches with only less than a single day of battery. It sounds preposterous that people are okay with this.
When I have £500 to spare, I’ll get that. Until then, my £60 Hauwei watch will do.
When I have £500 to spare, I’ll get that. Until then, my £60 Hauwei watch will do.
This is a very excellent comment, given the context and that this is an Android watch discussion and mine is not running Android.
What Huawei Android smart watch is fucking 60 Euros? I’ll buy it tonight.
I have a Watch5 Pro. Running with AOD, but with the gesture and touch activation features turned off, I get around 48 hours per charge. And I just tap a button to wake it instead of tapping the screen, which doesn’t take any longer.
Garmin 4 lyf!
I have both a three and a four. I have never gotten three days out of my three. I even replaced the battery in it right before work bought me a four. The average battery life for my three and my four is right around 36 hours.
Now, I get a LOT of notifications so maybe somebody’s watch who gets less notifications can go into deeper sleep and is able to sleep longer and stretch that power out. But a lot of people weren’t getting 3 days out of there threes.
The 45mm GW3 had 340mAh battery, which was a downgrade from 472mAh battery on the original Galaxy Watch. The review at GSM Arena mentioned that the 45mm variant of the original Galaxy Watch yielded 2.5 days under moderate use. Samsung’s quoted time is/was longer though that might be under ideal conditions.
I personally used only 4 and 6. Whilst the latter has a bigger battery owing to the larger size and plows through almost 2 days with AOD on(hardly any notifications or continuous Hr though), the 40mm GW 4 barely crawled a day for me.
