Database Develop

Display Settings

I read all the reviews saying the Gear the battery will die, well for me it does not not.
It lasts at least 2 days.
Thinking about increasing the display brightness and time out period?
What does everybody use?
I am at +4 Brightness and 7 seconds display time out.
Think I may try +5 and 10 seconds.

AstroDigital said:
I read all the reviews saying the Gear the battery will die, well for me it does not not.
I last at least 2 days.
Thinking about increasing the display brightness and time out period?
What does everybody use?
I am at +4 Brightness and 7 seconds display time out.
Think I may try +5 and 10 seconds.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Iam at +3 10sec. Lasts a good 24h, though I charge it every night.
Sent from my SM-N900T using xda app-developers app

I'm happy to charge my watch every night or 2, as i would normally take off my normal watch and put it on my beside table beside my charging mobile devices.

Not so much data so far, as I use GEAR for only one day - however after "regular" workday I still have 70% of juice ...
I use the watch for notifications and to dial last numbers mainly, as I talk using MW600 - it all runs smooth and headset takes over the voice even if phone call is started by the watch.

Mine last for 4 days..
Rooted.
And Greenify installed and all user apps hibernated.
Plus Ds battery saver pro installed.
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk now Free

I have my screen set to 5 minutes and off then it's just a press of the power button for the time and no going off just as you are doing something, that's the way I like it
Sent from my SM-N9005 using xda app-developers app

Bad battery life from professional reviewers

I am sick of hearing about how bad the battery life is on the Gear.
My Gear have great battery life, charge it every two days but yesterday.
The Google Smart watch is coming and it has much better battery life that the Gear's 12 hours??? !!!
Who can only get 12 hours on the Gear, and what do you do to burn the battery that quick?

Mine also lasts 2-3 days.. I'm connected to the note 2 if that makes a difference.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk

crzyricn said:
Mine also lasts 2-3 days.. I'm connected to the note 2 if that makes a difference.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I317 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Should make no difference at all.

thats because most reviewers dont know what they are talking about

My battery life is great. 3 to 4 days moderate use. And worse comes to worse wack it on the charger while i get ready for work and I have a days worth of battery.

I have a feeling they had pre-release versions which may have had worse battery life. Shame!

Yes, with more recent gear manager updates, I get around 3 days+

Mine lasts 3-4 days.
But I am only using it during the work day.

At the end of the day I have 85% left everyday. I think its biased reviews. I'm sure if the apple watch had a 6 hour battery they would says its genious and revolutionary.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using xda app-developers app

As a longtime 'professional' reviewer for over a decade (for the high fidelity audio industry), the non-rooted watch gives about 2 to 3 days battery life. Also, I don't recall seeing any reviews where they sideloaded apps, which makes the watch even more useful :good:
Frankly, don't trust all reviewers. :cyclops:

hahaha .... :laugh: ... they (those reviewers said about bad battery life) have already decided just on the number of xxx mAh. (once they see it.). :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
I NEVER TRUST ... I TRUST MYSELF ON WHAT I HAVE DECIDED and TRIED ON MY OWN.

My battery life is 3 or 4 days. .. depending of use .
I think it depends of 'home screen ' . With watch styler, if my watch face is 'white' battery life can be 2 or 3 days. But with a standard watch face (black) battery life is 3 or 4 days...
If bluetooth is always turn on, the other battery's drain can only be screen... and it depends of the number of notifications you receive every days ! (And number you look at your watch daily )

Yes I agree with you on that I get 2 to 3 days of battery life heavy usage brightness at 4 and timeout at 15

Yes my Gear had pretty decent battery life, 2-3 days. Works out great just plug it in when I go to bed.
Sent from my SM-N900W8 using xda app-developers app

benzoman3 said:
Yes I agree with you on that I get 2 to 3 days of battery life heavy usage brightness at 4 and timeout at 15
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have been using my gear on an S4 with android 4.2.2. Battery was usually about 50% at bedtime. I updated to the android 4.3 yesterday which gave me full capabilities of the Gear. Today after 8 hours of pretty heavy use (lots of email) I am at 90%. 4.3 does a much better job of handling BT connections, not just on the Gear but my other BT devices.
This is my 4th smartwatch (Sony MN800, Sony MN2SW, Pebble). The Sony MN2 was pretty decent, touchscreen/color but its battery life was terrible, had trouble making it through the whole day. Pebble had great battery life, constant on screen, but having to use buttons and no color was tough for me after having a touch color screen. Gear is definately heading in the right direction for me. Now that the battery life is can last 2+ days I am even more pleased with my decision to dive in. I turn the screen brightness to +2 which is extremely bright for indoor use.:good:

Yep, agreed.
My battery life is more than I can hope for with this thing.
I'm on day 2 and still have 61 percent battery life left.
I have screen brightness on 1 (which seems perfectly viewable for me) and time out for 7 seconds.
I can go 4 days easy with my current settings.

While I agree the battery life is a bit better than the reviews suggested, I'm surprised so many of you are getting 3-4 days worth. I use mine very lightly... it's stock, I don't have hardly any apps loaded on it, I'm currently just using it to occasionally see the time, and get txt/call/email notifications. I have the most battery efficient watch face (the black one with orange hands and only four markers), brightness on 4, timeout on 10s, using the latest gear manager on a stock Note 3. After 48hrs, I'm below 30% battery. The only excess usage I get is from the auto-wake... I do notice it coming on sometimes while I'm driving, or at the gym. Other than that, I really don't see how I could use it any less to get more life out of it (other than not using it at all). Once the software gets updated to make it a little more useful, I would expect battery life to get worse.
I'm not complaining, 2 days is acceptable to me, I just would have expected my usage patterns to put me at the long end of battery life relative to other users, rather than the short end.

Dan37tz said:
Yep, agreed.
My battery life is more than I can hope for with this thing.
I'm on day 2 and still have 61 percent battery life left.
I have screen brightness on 1 (which seems perfectly viewable for me) and time out for 7 seconds.
I can go 4 days easy with my current settings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree the reviewers had very bad results or bias, But at the same time I wish I knew how you guys were getting your results. Today was a light day, got maybe 20-30 texts and 5-10 emails. Didn't make any calls or respond to any texts with S-voice. I did just realize I had reset it recently so the brightness was at 4 with a 10 second time out. I normally run brightness at 2 and timeout at 7 to try to save the battery. I also use strong vibration and have the digital clock/weather watch face with a black background. I am at 82% after 12 hours, which again I don't think is bad. That would net me 2-3 days, but again that was what I consider very light usage. With heavy usage I doubt it would make it through the day.
I'm not complaining because I am ok with charging it every night, so long as it makes it through the day I am ok with it. I would just be happier if I knew I could get 2+ days with medium usage at least, including bright screen and all that jazz.
Also, side tracking I know, but what apps have you guys side loaded that you have found useful?

I have brightness at max and use it VERY heavily. I work as a mobile computer tech and all my calls are taken on it, I use svoice to make calls, I use svoice to reply to SMS and I'm always playing with it. The lowest battery at the end of a day (by which I mean 7:00am until midnight) was 38%.
I really cant fathom how it would be possible to deplete the battery in just 12 hours.

my use today :
I read 15 sms, 10 mail , take 3 pics and call with my father 15 min with gear speak phone (and the other 15 min with the phone.)
blue tooth connected permanently.
Number of auto wake : ?? A lot !!
Time Out : 15s
last complete charge : this night ( disconnect at 8 am.)
Now I read 1:28 am.
Battery level : 61%
it's all rights !!!

Battery Life Thread

So I went through the whole forum and didn't actually see a thread dedicated to battery life. I also have been noticing that I've been only getting about 3 days or so of battery so I figure I make this thread and see if that's unusual. Please post how long your watch lasts on average and your usage/apps. I use Glance which I suppose takes more battery since it shows weather but this past charge cycle I've been using it much less to see if it would extend the battery. I also use the stock music control when I'm in the car. I don't get too many notifications. So not sure why it's not lasting the 5-7 days that it should.

With glance that was my average that's why I stopped using it. Without, usually a week. I charge it Saturday night usually.
Sent from my ME301T using Tapatalk

Ever since I started using Glance I've noticed the reduced battery life too. I've accepted it as a trade off though, since the Pebble is updating much more frequently.
Sent from my dlx using Tapatalk

ou2mame said:
With glance that was my average that's why I stopped using it. Without, usually a week. I charge it Saturday night usually.
Sent from my ME301T using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've always used Glance. I never considered that it might be what was causing my poor battery life. Thanks!

Thanks guys, I'm glad to know that Glance really does matter. I'll see if the functionality of it is worth it.

I'd have to guess it would be Glance. I've consistently gotten upwards of a week, even back when I had hourly/bi-hourly status reports on my phone's battery state (plus frequent notifications).

[POLL] How has your Gear Live affected your phone's battery life?

What are your results after having the Gear Live for a full day? Also include the phone you are pairing it with.

Draining like hell. Sony Xperia Z1 compact. Phone shut down at 11pm last night for the first time ever. I usually have about 40% left at bedtime and I even had it on charge for an extra hour in the day.
EDIT: I may have been a little premature here. After a phone reset and a day of use the phone battery drain is not as bad as it first was. It's worse than normal but not drastically so.

No option for "improved" battery life. In my case since I don't have to pull the phone every 2 minutes it seen to me that it is doing a lot better. unplug at 7:15 this morning and it is currently at 96% (At this time it is usually at 85ish)

Pretty solid drain over here...
Gym session killed batter on phone. But I was also getting a lot of texts & changing songs, so.... Maybe that's on me. Haha. Oh well. Watch battery life is fine, so NBD

I'm paired with an M8 and while I do see a little more drain I would not call it drastic. I actually hadn't even noticed until I saw this thread and actually looked so it's small enough for me it's unnoticeable
Sent from my HTC6525LVW using Tapatalk

I also have my gear connected, but impact not huge
Sent from my GT-I9505 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

RAM is a bigger problem. The Wear app uses anywhere between 115 - 150MB, which is quite a lot.

No impact on my Note3.
Ian B

I haven't noticed any change on my M7 running GPe.
Sent from my HTC One using XDA Free mobile app

I noticed a big reduction, but I suspect it's because I now have Google Now set to on. I'm using it today with Google Now turned off, but the watch still connected etc, and it seems to have gone back to normal battery life.
Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

There seems to be a small difference when paired with a Nexus 5, nothing too big though.

Anyone who has two or more devices connected to the watch, does it drain the battery of the watch faster?

Big difference, my note 3 won't last half a day if i use my watch.

Used to get about 7 hours with heavy use on my note 3 before plugging in the external battery, now I get about 5 1/2 hours when the watch is connected.
Sent from my SM-N900P using XDA Free mobile app

I have a Sony Xperia Z ultra and the Android Wear application on my phone is killing my phone´s battery
I have installed Gsam battery monitor and the application was in use by the system for almost 3 hours and a half of 5 hours I was running the phone without charging...
What I have done is to "force stop" feature in the android system menu and since then, battery is normal and I am still receiving notifications from my phone to the watch
I suspect that the android wear application has some important bugs related to battery draining issues in some cell phone models like Sony

It doesn't seem to have made any noticeable difference in battery life on my HTC One M8. I haven't paired it with my Note 3 yet, so I'll have to see how it does too.

Killing the battery on my One Plus. I don't know if I have too many apps going on my watch or what, but this watch is slaughtering my battery life. The One Plus has a decent size battery and great battery life pre Gear Live.

Bluetooth is bluetooth, if you have the latest version of bluetooth sure the bluetooth uses a bit of the battery but having the phone talk to your watch, bluetooth headset or car makes no difference.
The watch no sooner affect your battery life than any other bluetooth device will.
I never turn bluetooth off, hop in car the phone pairs with the car, go for a jog pairs with the headphones.

LG G3 855 version. Not only does it affect my battery, it also affects the phone. I get constant redraws on both LG home launcher and Nova launcher when the watch is connected.
Sent from my LG-D855 using XDA Premium HD app
---------- Post added at 10:43 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:38 AM ----------
AstroDigital said:
Bluetooth is bluetooth, if you have the latest version of bluetooth sure the bluetooth uses a bit of the battery but having the phone talk to your watch, bluetooth headset or car makes no difference.
The watch no sooner affect your battery life than any other bluetooth device will.
I never turn bluetooth off, hop in car the phone pairs with the car, go for a jog pairs with the headphones.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're totally right about Bluetooth especially with LE 4.0 or 4.1. I think that it the gear live case Google Now is the source of the drain not Bluetooth itself. It's totally pinging back and forth. Google services uses more battery than my screen sometimes and don't get me started on the wake locks. I never had that problem with the s4 or s5 and my other gear watches.
Sent from my LG-D855 using XDA Premium HD app

No big difference on a note3 running CM11 and several watch apps and at least one or two other devices paired.
I have always used Google now so maybe that is why I don't notice much.

Poor Battery Life

I received my Watch 3 last week. So far I like the watch but it's battery life is horrid! My original Samsung Watch would run 4 to 5 days between charges. The Watch 3 gets, maybe 2.5 days between charges. Anyone else notice this drop in run time??

ChadH42 said:
I received my Watch 3 last week. So far I like the watch but it's battery life is horrid! My original Samsung Watch would run 4 to 5 days between charges. The Watch 3 gets, maybe 2.5 days between charges. Anyone else notice this drop in run time??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you got the LTE version or wifi only?
Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

I'm not impressed by the battery myself so far compared to the GW1. I got the 45mm (bluetooth). Charged it last night. Wore it to bed, this morning it had already dropped 7% just sleeping. Now its 11am and the battery is at 76% and I haven't even been playing with the watch. App says it wil llast 1 day 18 hrs, but based off the usage already I don't believe that.

howie411 said:
I'm not impressed by the battery myself so far compared to the GW1. I got the 45mm (bluetooth). Charged it last night. Wore it to bed, this morning it had already dropped 7% just sleeping. Now its 11am and the battery is at 76% and I haven't even been playing with the watch. App says it wil llast 1 day 18 hrs, but based off the usage already I don't believe that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is it tracking your heartbeat or sleep ?
Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

Well, there are more sensors and a smaller battery for starters.
But I think the default settings will be checking your heartbeat regularly, working out if you are...working out, and if you sleep wearing it the sensors will be working through the night. Go into the health settings (both phone and watch) and check what you have enabled. You might be surprised.
.

The GW3 - 45mm has a smaller battery (340mAh) than the GW - 46mm (472mAh).

racingmatt1 said:
Do you got the LTE version or wifi only?
Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Bluetooth / wifi version.

I have 45mm LTE version, but not activated and using it on wifi/bluetooth. I disable most of the notifications from my phone - I have the watch mainly to be a watch and for fitness/health. My average burn, with AOD, is between 3-4% an hour. Brightness set to 4 with auto low light brightness.
Just found the continuous monitoring (heart & stress) feature. I'll play around with that to see how it goes.
The bigger downside, especially if battery life is an issue for you, is this think takes 2.5 hours to charge fully. That is SLOW for a battery this size. So 30 minutes on the charger while you shower only gets you like 20%.

I've found that music has used 8% of battery, I don't even use the music app, I don't think it can be removed, so what can I do?

Haha... I was actually thinking the battery was much better than I expected! Mind you, I'm coming from Android Wear, so that might explain it.... previously had a Tag Connected Modular 45 and for the first week ( until the first update ) I'd get about 10 hours from a full charge
As has been said, smaller battery and more sensors. It's a pain ( especially if you want to use sleep tracking ) but I've taken to just topping it up whenever I'm sitting watching TV or whatever - so plenty of short bursts of charge rather than waiting for it to run down. A few Qi chargers dotted around the place helps.
I agonised over the decision to buy this over the Garmin Fenix 6 Pro for quite a while - I love the idea of a trans-reflective display on a watch and wish there were more of them, and the battery life is So much better. The fact is though there's no perfect option currently in the smartwatch arena, GW3 has best features and arguably the smoothesr experience but only adequate battery, awful Bixby, and lack of Google stuff like maps ( which I found really useful for walking around cities, Here WeGo is a poor substitute IMHO. ) Garmin have better battery life but not as nice to look at ( again IMHO ) and even worse ecosystem, Android Wear has the best ecosystem and assistant with many options to choose from, but generally rubbish battery life and in my experience laggy/glitchy/buggy software. Apple watch isn't really an option for Android users, though I dislike square watches generally anyway and dislike Apple almost as much :laugh:

sidepipe said:
Haha... I was actually thinking the battery was much better than I expected! Mind you, I'm coming from Android Wear, so that might explain it.... previously had a Tag Connected Modular 45 and for the first week ( until the first update ) I'd get about 10 hours from a full charge
As has been said, smaller battery and more sensors. It's a pain ( especially if you want to use sleep tracking ) but I've taken to just topping it up whenever I'm sitting watching TV or whatever - so plenty of short bursts of charge rather than waiting for it to run down. A few Qi chargers dotted around the place helps.
I agonised over the decision to buy this over the Garmin Fenix 6 Pro for quite a while - I love the idea of a trans-reflective display on a watch and wish there were more of them, and the battery life is So much better. The fact is though there's no perfect option currently in the smartwatch arena, GW3 has best features and arguably the smoothesr experience but only adequate battery, awful Bixby, and lack of Google stuff like maps ( which I found really useful for walking around cities, Here WeGo is a poor substitute IMHO. ) Garmin have better battery life but not as nice to look at ( again IMHO ) and even worse ecosystem, Android Wear has the best ecosystem and assistant with many options to choose from, but generally rubbish battery life and in my experience laggy/glitchy/buggy software. Apple watch isn't really an option for Android users, though I dislike square watches generally anyway and dislike Apple almost as much :laugh:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There are a lot of dilemmas in there mate! But I think what you chose in the end was the right choice. Tizen is a very reliable and optimised O/S and whilst there aren't billions of apps for it, who really cares? The one's you will use the most are either baked in or available 3rd party, and yep, Bixby is rubbish, I want to love it but I gave up. I do agree the Apple watch is an ugly square thing that looks like a fitness band, everyone wearing them so no individuality, the GW3 is classy and watch like! The battery isn't really that bad, will easily get you through a day or two and most of us charge overnight or a quick top up in the morning if sleep monitoring.
Enjoy!!

With blanaced settings you can easily get 2+ days of battery and more if you set the heart rate monitor to manual because heart rate will be used automatically during work out so I dont see a benefit of having it all the time or every 10 mins to measure my heart unless you have health issues and you need to track it, bixby is only useful to set a reminder, alarm or call someone (generally it wont recognize names properly so I use 'wife' for example instead of the name to avoid this issue) 'Hi bixby call wife' works good 'Hi bixby text wife' works fine too, Here wego i find it works better if you have the here we go phone app installed and everything you do from the phone it syncs back to the watch app.

compared to my active 2 watch the battery seems about the same for how i use it and sensors i have active. I get almost 2 days . when i'm on a normal routine i put my watch on the charger when i wake up to shower and get ready and ive never really noticed issues with not having the watch dead the next day and if i forgot to take it off i would still have battery for the day. im sure millage will vary depending on what your doing but still would expect a full day battery.
My expectations must be a lot lower , makes me wonder what amount of time are most expecting to get from a smart watch . I always thought getting about two days was great and as long as i got a full day into the next i was happy lol just my two cents

nabobcoffee said:
...so I dont see a benefit of having it all the time or every 10 mins to measure my heart unless you have health issues and you need to track it..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's definitely helpful in sleep tracking to estimate the various stages of sleep. Agree constant monitoring is overkill (except in a workout), but every 10 minutes can be useful for tracking training progress and recovery.
From what I can tell, every 10 minutes doesn't drain battery much. I'm getting @ 3% drain per hour with that, and about half is my display.
I tend to think big battery drains (which I disable) are Bixby always listening, and any "gesture to wake" features. Haven't analyzed it, but my suspicion is "gesture to wake" uses more battery than AOD.

I use the watch for 5 days (SM-R845F) ...
-10% during 1 hour of use.
Off: WIFI, Buetooth, GPS
ON: 4G
No syncing.
I only use it as a watch!
What could be the problem? Is the clock bad?

racingmatt1 said:
Is it tracking your heartbeat or sleep ?
Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I set mine to "GoodNight" and it still tracks heart rate and sleep. Amazingly on this setting the battery usage is minimal (single digits) so there plenty of juice left in the am.
---------- Post added at 01:59 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:54 AM ----------
apprentice said:
There are a lot of dilemmas in there mate! But I think what you chose in the end was the right choice. Tizen is a very reliable and optimised O/S and whilst there aren't billions of apps for it, who really cares? The one's you will use the most are either baked in or available 3rd party, and yep, Bixby is rubbish, I want to love it but I gave up. I do agree the Apple watch is an ugly square thing that looks like a fitness band, everyone wearing them so no individuality, the GW3 is classy and watch like! The battery isn't really that bad, will easily get you through a day or two and most of us charge overnight or a quick top up in the morning if sleep monitoring.
Enjoy!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I disabled Bixby on my Note 9 (which was not easy) and even harder to re-enable as at first I thought the disablement on the phone was preventing it from running on the watch. but I am happy now that i got Google Assistant to also work on my watch (except for alarms and reminders (for which you still need Bixby)

I think the battery life is poor especially if used actively during a run or cycling.

Batt life is not the best...