Technology

Depends. My Garmin goes for close to a week but my galaxy 6 barely makes 20h. I don't run anything fancy on it other than enabling always on screen. I won't compromise on that as I think it's ridiculous to have to shake your arm to see what time it is.

It's normal for most afaik but that's because manufacturers make a trimmed down phone to go on your wrist which means you have to charge it daily, without realising it's on your wrist so it doesn't need to be super slim with huge cuts to battery size to go in your pocket.

My garmin has an always on display, heart rate, steps, blood oxygen, thermometer, barometer and whatever else and yet still manages a 4 week battery life, 3 weeks with normal use (1h gps per day, using the touchscreen and higher brightness) or even around 50-60h of GPS/more frequent heart rate/active maps activity tracking

It's on 7% now and is giving me an estimated battery life of >2 days, which just shows how abysmal many smart watch battery lives are

I have a Galaxy Watch4 and it would last me about 3 days new and is down to around two days now. I've already bought a replacement battery but haven't bothered to put it in yet.

This is with the always on display off and everything else on including wifi.

To a degree it depends on settings. But consider that I've been using this watch for 5 years or so, and I have all my settings more or less "maxed out" regarding consumption. I don't even have auto-brightness on because I always found it annoying for it to adjust when I flicked my wrist - I just have it locked at about 80%.

But yeah, most smartwatches that I've ever been familiar with are getting a couple days when new unless you turn off features. (Bear in mind the newest thing I have first-hand experience with is my original Galaxy Watch, and which I am currently still wearing) I want to say I was making it 48h + when new, but that was so long ago...

For typical smartwatches when I see impressive claims regarding battery life much longer than that, it usually turns out that the person has turned off one thing or another that I don't want to turn off.

Look at Hybrid smartwatches in general, and in particular some of the Garmin models (pack a lunch, there are a LOT of Garmin models, some very similar to each other) for super long battery life, I think.

All this is just IME, and I don't pay really close attention to smartwatch tech except peeking every couple years to see if there's anything that might convince me to move on from my Galaxy Watch. I do like some of the Garmin hybrid models, but I'm not sure I'd like them longterm.

Agreed. My old pebble lasts for over a week, not that I use it for much more than an alarm clock/metronome nowadays.

It does those jobs extremely well, though.

It depends. Wear OS is heavy because it's much more feature filled. I switched from a Garmin to a Galaxy Watch 4 because the feature set of Wear OS fits my use case much more than the Vivoactive 4 I had.

Plus WOS is just better than tizen, hands down.

It's changed a lot since I moved off my Huawei then. And the primary reasons I went Tizen when I did were the glacial pace of software improvements and the shitty "upgrade" they announced to the SoC all the WearOS devices were using at the time. I don't recall the details of the crappy qualcomm "upgrade" aside from remembering that it really wasn't one in practice, and solved neither the battery life nor performance problems of WearOS at the time. (not even sure they were calling it WearOS then, IIRC they changed it from the original name around that time)

A used watch 5 pro (or just buy a new one) can be had for like $160. I can leave all my stuff turned on and I always get over 48 hours.

I'm not surprised a watch several gens newer is going to get better battery life than my original GW, but I don't find I'm fussed enough about anything about it to spend money on an upgrade currently.