Top 5 Ways to Save Battery Life on Samsung Galaxy Watch

The Samsung Galaxy Watch packs a slew of features under its sleeves. Its trove of sensors makes sure that your sleep and fitness data are properly recorded and stored. But all these neat features come at a price — battery life.

Though Samsung promises a battery life of four days (46mm non-LTE version) of the Galaxy Watch, it’s a tad difficult to achieve. That is especially true when all the features and sensors are switched on. After all, they would need to draw power from somewhere.

And the proprietary charger makes sure that you can’t charge this high-end watch when you’re not at home/office.

Thankfully, with some tweaking, you can get the Galaxy Watch’s battery to stay a little bit longer on a single charge.

In this post today, we will discuss some nifty ways to save battery life on the Samsung Galaxy Watch.

1. Disable Always On Display

The Always On Display (AOD) feature is one of the most helpful and smart features on Samsung phones (with AMOLED displays) and smartwatches. With it, you can check the time, battery and notifications without lifting your watch/phone. As you guessed right, keeping it running requires more power than usual.

So, if you have been struggling with terrible battery life or do not use this feature at all, you may turn it off from the settings.

To do so, navigate your way to Settings on your watch, and tap on Display > Watch always on, and toggle the switch off.

2. Use Black Watch Faces

By now, you must already be familiar with the workings of AMOLED displays and how it works to save battery juice. For those unaware, here’s a quick drill down.

Unlike LCD screens, an AMOLED screen doesn’t have a backlight. Rather all individual pixels light up when in use. When not in use, they stay black. It also works the other way. When the display is black, the pixels stay off thus conserving precious juice.

Hence a watch face set in darker shades will not only make it run for a bit longer and gives the watch a classy look.

Thankfully, there are plenty of black watch faces in the store. Open the Galaxy Wearable app, head over to the Watch Faces section and search for AMOLED watch faces.

Once you’ve spotted the watch face you like, apply it and tap on Save. While some of the watch faces are free, most of them are paid. Thankfully, you don’t have to spend a bomb to get them onboard.

3. Disable Wake-Up Gesture

Sure, it looks super cool when the screen lights up with all its might every time you raise your hand.

But such a convenient feature is bound to have a serious impact. That is especially true if you are an active person and move your hands quite a lot.

To turn this feature off, go to Settings > Advanced and toggle the switch for Wake-up gestures. Simple.

4. Enable Good Night Mode

If you prefer not to disable the Wake-up gestures altogether, the next option is to enable the Good Night mode. This one disables the wake gestures, suppresses notifications & sounds and even deactivates the Always On Display feature when you are sleeping.

The good thing about this mode is that Sleep tracking will continue to work as expected. In short, it will work in silence.

It too can be found under the Advanced settings.

5. Are All Notifications Important?

Are all the notifications important? Does the watch need to vibrate at every notification you receive?

The key to good battery life is to limit notifications to a few priority apps like your mail app and messaging app. To make the changes, navigate to the Notification settings and tap on Manage notifications.

Now, deselect the apps that you don’t want. While you are at it, you can also disable notifications of unimportant apps on your phone through Settings > Notifications. Trust me, your watch and the phone will thank you.

One More Thing

Sadly, long battery life on the Galaxy watch means that you have to make a few trade-offs. I get it — with a powerful watch like this, it would be a shame to switch off all the features. You wouldn’t want to use your smartwatch like an analog one.

I recommend you to test a few things mentioned above and pick the ones that work the best for you without making significant compromises.

In my case, enabling all the major features gave me a battery life of three days on a full charge. And for the poor planner in me, who often forgets to charge her watch, the built-in Battery Saver mode has saved me on most days.

This mode squeezes in a few extra hours by turning the screen grey and shutting down most sensors except the basic ones. You can find this mode via Settings > Battery > Power saving.

At the same time, turning off the watch’s connections such as Bluetooth won’t get you much. Also, the Galaxy Watch’s GPS goes on standby mode when it is paired to your phone. So unless you are out running or walking most of the day without pairing the phone, keeping it on should work just fine.

Next up: Looking to manage your Android’s battery better? Check out the following post on how you can prolong your phone battery’s life.