There are three main ways to make your smartwatch last longer than a day. There’s the simplest way to get a fitness watch with weeks-long battery life: use a powerful, efficient CPU that sticks to health data and notifications. The other two solutions for extending smartwatch battery life have drawbacks and compromises, and I’m not sure if that will change.
Smartwatch makers know we’re tired of charging our watches every day. In recent years, they’ve sped up charging times so you can charge quickly before or after bed, making it easier to sleep with your watch on. For many people, this stopgap isn’t enough, and they switch to “dumb” watches from Garmin or Fitbit to avoid the hassle.
Apple doesn’t make its range of watches last 18 hours year after year just for fun. It wouldn’t have been able to spend a year adding new, power-hungry features or sensors without consumer apathy and shareholder panic. It also can’t add additional battery capacity without destroying the design.
In a way, Wear OS watches do it better. The Galaxy Watch 6’s 40-hour battery is certainly an improvement, albeit down 10 hours from last year, while the 24-hour Pixel Watch 2 at least makes it easier to choose consistent charging times for it.
Problems arise whenever you try to hold on for longer.
Large battery only suitable for larger wrists
If you’ve followed my weekly column, you know that I prefer fitness watches to traditional smartwatches, mostly for running metrics and battery life.I Do However, the option of a suitable wrist application is missed. That’s why my two favorite smartwatches of the past two years have been the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro and the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
The Watch 5 Pro and Ultra 2 have battery life of 80 hours and 36 hours respectively, which is well beyond smartwatch standards. Equally important for my purposes, they should last 20 or 12 hours while tracking your GPS location for exercise – in the same range as a Garmin watch. We’ve also heard that Samsung will relaunch the Galaxy Watch 7 Pro with a slightly larger battery.
Besides being expensive, what are the downsides to these watches? If you include the strap, the two flagship smartwatches weigh about 2.5-3 ounces, which is more than twice the weight of a typical fitness tracker.
The weight of the average smartwatch continues to increase, even if it usually only increases by one gram per year, such as the Galaxy Watch 4 (26 grams) vs. Watch 6 (29 grams). They keep squeezing in more components and battery capacity, like subtle weight training on our wrists. But to double the battery life, the weight must also double.
Tech brands know that their target audience—eager tech fans who read sites like ours and always want the latest flagship model, plus gullible journalists who get an $800 watch for free—will accept wearing a chunk of metal on their wrist. Extend battery life. When people complain that their mainline watches die quickly, Apple and Samsung can point to their acclaimed high-end watches and say you, a “power user,” should spend more.
Again, I love that these watches finally “solve” the core flaws of smartwatches for me.But some people can’t afford this solution, while others don’t have the knack to wear solution. As long as these high-end models exist, smartwatch brands have no incentive to make cheaper models more efficient. Luxuriously packaged new features are a higher priority.
OnePlus Watch 2 solves this problem with trade-offs
The OnePlus Watch 2 blew us away when it first launched, lasting four days per charge. However, the more we used it, the more we realized that longer battery life comes with serious trade-offs.
OnePlus attributes its longevity to its dual-processor design: the 4nm Snapdragon W5 chip handles heavy-duty application tasks, while its 12nm BES2700 co-processor handles “background tasks” like notifications and health data via a lightweight RTOS. Google and OnePlus have worked together to make this system work, calling it the Wear OS hybrid interface.
It sounds great in theory, but in practice, two AC reviewers found that it missed thousands of steps during a busy day, claiming you’re standing while sitting, too much on calm days. Stress was reported and heart rate was not properly tracked during higher anaerobic exercise workouts. Sometimes it fails to send notifications as well.
These issues stem directly from OnePlus’ hybrid operating system. Its coprocessor has a hard time sampling your health data fast enough, either by design to save battery life or due to its clock limitations. Either way, it undermines one of the main reasons for wearing a smartwatch.
OnePlus also saves battery life by using Google’s special XML Watch Face format to save battery life. The only problem is that our reviewer found the watch face boring, and when he tried to install a custom watch using Facer, the watch’s battery life dropped from four days to four days. one.
OnePlus is relatively new to the smartwatch scene, while other brands like Google or Apple might handle a hybrid system better.Delegating background tasks to more efficient chips may be the only way to smartwatches Can Lasts longer.
I can’t take it for granted that the drawbacks of a hybrid system won’t outweigh its benefits. Most smartwatches already have a power-saving mode, and Hybrid Mode feels like a rebrand of the same principle: disabling power-hungry features and lowering the sampling rate of heart rate or location. I don’t see much point in wearing a bulky smartwatch if you’re not going to use its smart features.
It would be great if future smartwatches could use low-power chips to track dozens of health metrics in the background while extending battery life! But I doubt tech brands can pull this off without making the data inconsistent and unreliable; hopefully I’ll be proven wrong.
Smartwatch AI might not change anything
This is the year of artificial intelligence, at least on smartphones. What this means for smartwatches and their battery life is unclear.
With Gemini essentially replacing Google Assistant on Android phones, it seemed like only a matter of time before these brands tried using Gemini and other AI features on Android watches. Of course, most versions of AI these days rely on cloud-based computing, and pulling data from Wi-Fi can quickly drain a watch’s battery.
Other AI features will run on the backend. We know Samsung plans to roll out a “vitality score” for the Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Ring this summer, based on your sleep and health data. If I’m going to rely on this data, I’d rather my watch get the most accurate data possible rather than doing random checks to save battery.
Ultimately, my guess is that smartwatch chips will start to look more and more like phone chips, with multiple cores, processors, and AI-focused NPUs, all running on your wrist over time. As time goes on, more and more features will be added. We’ll see how this affects smartwatch battery life, but I think breaking even is about all we can hope for.