Google’s revised focus on the Wear OS platform resulted in various enhancements in smartwatches like Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 5. It also includes Google’s own Pixel Watch. As these wearables have essential setups almost in every segment as compared to previous Wear OS watches.
While they almost contented their user everywhere. But when it comes to their battery then they last only for 24 hours. Therefore, in order to extend the battery life of your Wear OS 3 smartwatch, the following tips help you out.
Turn Off Always On Display
In recent days, the Always On Display become one of the cool features that everyone is looking for in their smartwatch. Although, it puts a crucial impact on battery life. And despite all OLED display enhancements over the past years still, AOD can easily eat up to 10 % of your watch’s battery in a day.
And hence for better battery life, it is recommended to turn it off, and the steps are as follows:
- Open the Settings menu in your Wear OS watch.
- Scroll down to Display.
- Disable the Always On Display toggle.
Change the Screen Timeout
Another great way to enhance the battery life of the Wear OS smartwatch is to turn off its display when not needed. And this can be achieved by reducing the screen timeout to 15 seconds. Also, there’s no need for the display to remain on for more than some second.
- Open the Settings menu in your Wear OS watch.
- Scroll down to Display and select Screen timeout.
- Set the timeout to 15 seconds.
Therefore, by doing so, the display of your Wear OS smartwatch will turn off after 15 seconds of inactivity. Hence, this small change is unlikely to bother you from battery drainage. Whereas, it will help to extend the watch’s battery life.
Tweak the Vibration Motor’s Strength
The vibrating alerts or notifications have sought attention to important calls, notifications, and alarms. Although, it drains your watch battery a lot.
While Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 5 series users can tweak the vibration motor intensity. In this way, it continues to keep you informed with important calls and alerts, with minimum impact on your battery life. Let’s go through the steps to perform an action on Galaxy Watch 4 or Watch 5.
- Open the Settings menu on your Galaxy Watch 4 or Watch 5.
- Scroll down and select Sounds and vibration.
- From the Vibration sub-menu, select Light under the Vibration Intensity sub-menu.
Additionally, a user can disable System vibration from the Vibration menu. This will reduce the usage of the vibration motor, thereby extending the battery life of the wearable.
Use Bedtime Mode
It’s not necessarily required to light up or vibrate your Smartwatch display all the time, especially at night. It not only disturbs you but your partner as well.
Also, in Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch 4/5, the Bedtime Mode turns off all notifications. This also ensures that the display doesn’t automatically turn on when someone tossing in their sleep. Whereas, all health sensors will continue to work uninterrupted as they collect important health data through the night.
To do this, go to through the Wear OS settings menu and select Advanced features > Bedtime mode.
If you don’t want it to turn on automatically on a schedule, follow the steps below to enable Bedtime Mode manually.
- Swipe down from the watch face in order to bring up the Quick Settings panel.
- Tap the Bedtime mode tile, whose icon features a half moon, to enable the feature.
Disable “Hey Google” Hotword Detection
If you use a voice assistant on a smartwatch in order to recognize your voice command. Then this feature keeps the microphone on your smartwatch switched on. This hurts battery life as it drains a lot of battery.
Therefore, if you want to extend the runtime of your Wear OS smartwatch, you should turn off the always-on “Hey Google” hotword detection.
Follow the given steps below to disable the “Hey Google” wake word on your Wear OS smartwatch.
- Open the Settings menu, scroll down and select Google.
- Tap on Assistant and turn off the Hey Google toggle.
Use Power Saving Mode
Further, if you want to use your Wear OS smartwatch’s runtime to the fullest then it’s quite efficient to use the built-in Power Saving mode. Since it disables all battery-consuming features of your wearable that includes health-tracking sensors, Always On Display, reduces the screen brightness, and turns off various gestures. But at the same time, it saves a lot of battery for your smartwatch.
Therefore in order to do the same then go to the following settings:
Quick Settings panel of your Wear OS smartwatch to quickly enable the mode. Alternatively, jump into Settings > Battery and enable the Power saver toggle from there.
