An interesting thing just occurred with my GW4 running the 4th iteration of the One UI5 Watch Beta code, I charged my watch a little over 3 hours ago, and I have been watching the battery drain at a rate of about 4% per hour. I investigated, and found that location was suddenly running on the watch after I charged it. I keep location off, as my phone always comes along for the ride with my watch. Has anyone else noticed this after charging their watch? The power drop was dramatic. Usually, I see the Wearable app register a 1% power drain for the watch after 3 hours of post charge operation. I have seen posts by other members citing large power drains, and I suspect the GPS may be the culprit in some of these instances.
As a follow-up, I just charged my GW4 again and this time a full charge yields 1 day and 23 hours wort of charge. Over the last week or so each charge would yield 2 days and 8 hours of charge, and it would last about that long. Location is not on and no modifications have been made since yesterday when I had to turn off location after seeing the battery drain. Just exactly how does a GW4 calculate battery life? Is it an estimate, a wild guess, does it average recent charge cycles, or is there a real determinative calculation routine built into OS4?
Please use the steps below to improve battery life in your Watch devices:
Power off watch. Power on watch while holding both side buttons at the the same time. When you see "Samsung" with "rebooting...." under it, quickly tap the upper button (power button) 3x. Once menu appears, navigate with power button to "Recovery" (highlighted in blue) then press and hold power button. Now in recovery, navigate with bottom button to "Wipe cache partition". Press power button. Navigate to "Yes" and press power button.
Since my last post on the matter a week ago I have noticed a spontaneous increase in Watch4 battery life. It went from 1 day 23 hours to 2 days 20 hours and the battery life is real! I did nor clear the cache, but was simply more patient with the watch as it learned my watch usage habits, I guess. This fluctuation in battery capacity has been going on since the early part of June, and I attribute the increase of available battery life to be due to the lack of updates to the One UI5 Watch Beta. Every time we have had an update there appeared to be a reset in watch battery capacity (I'll bet that each update also resets the cache as part of the update install!) We have not had a Beta update in about 2 weeks and I don't expect one until the release of the 1st round of Wear OS4 releases, but I'll just bet that we will have to retrain our watches when that happens.
Well, I'm still looking for the Holy Grail then, as I think we should be able to turn off programs on the watch that we do not or will not use. At the very least we should be able to toggle off background activities from apps that use it. Both would give users more control of their equipment, and save us the very valuable commodity - battery life - which is easily the biggest, and most self-evident weakness of an otherwise great smartwatch line.
