It’s okay if the Pixel Watch only manages a day of battery life - The Verge

A new report claims that Google’s forthcoming Pixel Watch will "only" get 24 hours of battery life. While that’s nowhere close to fitness trackers, it’s actually pretty standard for a full-featured flagship smartwatch.

While Google confirmed last month that a Pixel Watch is on its way, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the device, like its hardware specs. The rumor mill has been buzzing, however, and the gist is the device will purportedly feature a 300mAh battery and Samsung’s last-gen wearable processor. The latest report from 9to5 Google claims that the watch will get around 24 hours of battery life on a single charge and that fast charging isn’t in the mix. It might be tempting to cry doom and gloom, but if this pans out? These numbers are par for the course.

Battery life remains one of the biggest challenges for smartwatch makers. Try to pack in a larger battery to get more juice and end up with a gargantuan watch that excludes anyone with wrists. Try to design a slim and sleek watch, and you’ll end up with something that can barely last the workday. Add an always-on display, an increasingly popular feature, and end up with even worse battery life. Try to cram in as many advanced features as possible, and watch how fast that battery goes from 100 to zero percent.

It’s a huge burden for consumers, too. If you want to track sleep, having a smartwatch with long enough battery life and / or fast charging is a must. The same is true if you’re an active person who does several hours of GPS activity per day. (It’s one reason why many marathoners opt for a Garmin, Polar, or Coros over a more “advanced” wearable.) It’s also a consideration for folks who use their smartwatches to take calls while on the go.

The Fenix 7S has spectacular battery life... but it also has solar charging, doesn’t have an OLED screen, and lacks cellular connectivity.

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When you smoosh all these factors together, the Pixel Watch having 24 hours on a single charge is decent by today’s standards. I’ve yet to test a Wear OS watch that lasts longer than a day. Apple’s stuck with an estimated 18-hour battery life for all its smartwatches — even though many models will get you a bit more than that. Samsung’s Tizen watches often hovered around the 24–48 hour mark, while the Galaxy Watch 4 is notorious for falling extremely short of its estimated 40-hour battery life. Meanwhile, Fitbit used to knock it out of the park when it came to battery life, but since it’s added always-on displays to its latest trackers, that’s shrunk to two to three days with the feature enabled.

Of course, you’ll find fitness watches with battery life that exceeds a week — sometimes even multiple weeks. I’ve been testing the Garmin Forerunner 255 for over a week with roughly five hours of GPS activity, and I’ve still got 40 percent battery left. However, that’s because this watch prioritizes fitness tracking, has a low-power transflective screen, and doesn’t have a ton of “smart” features. This is generally the case with multisport fitness watches.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/2/23151748/pixel-watch-battery-wear-os-3-google-apple-samsung

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