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The latest smart watches are a real wrist game: access to phone and fitness tracking, sports and weather updates, even during breathing exercises. All these features are designed to make our lives easier, and for them we pay generously. But a smartwatch is useless when the battery is dead.
Enter the Samsung Galaxy Watch. It is a stylish and traditional notebook with a nice mix of smart features and fitness, including the ability to receive and answer phone calls, emails and WhatsApp messages, make contactless payments, play music, help you with Samsung Bixby voice assistant, measure your heart rate and more.
There are two versions of the Galaxy watch. The smallest, midnight pink or black gold, has a 42mm screen and costs £ 279. The larger, silver version with a 46mm screen costs £ 299. A 4G model, which will allow you to make and receive phone calls without your smartphone nearby, should be released later this year.
Above all, watches have a new type of battery, which has been heavily marketed: 270 mAh for the smallest watch and 472 mAh for the largest. According to Samsung, one charge will keep the watch 42mm for four days and the 46mm version, seven days.
Read on to find out how this compares with other smartwatches. Or go straight to our comments on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 42mm and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 46mm.
How long does the battery of a smart watch?
If you have looked for a smart watch with a long battery life, you will have noticed a wide variation between what you offer. This is partly due to the quality of the watch and partly because the manufacturer's claims are based on different (but often light) usage scenarios.
For example, Huawei has just announced a watch that will last a month with a single battery charge, with all features disabled. With the activity tracking features enabled continuously – which is more likely than you would use, Huawei indicates 22 hours.
Our tests are based on coherent and real scenarios. The longest battery life of all the smart watches we tested was three weeks – and the shortest, two days.
You can see the range of battery discharges on sale from the selection of the main models below.
Apple Watch Series 4 (£ 399)
The new Apple Watch Series 4, by its own admission, lasts only 18 hours. Certainly, it incorporates many features into a small device: GPS, 30% larger screen, new animated dials, ability to detect falls and call emergency services on your behalf, three new heart monitors approved by the FDA and a Walkie. Walkie function, to name a few.
Nevertheless, it is disappointing that the battery life is not longer, especially considering the price you pay for it. So, this can not always be "an essential part of people's lives," as Apple described during the launch, its use becoming a stop-start experience. This means, for example, that you can not use it for sleep tracking if you have to reload it every other night. Series 4 does not have a native application for sleep tracking, but you could have installed a third-party sleep tracking app.
But that may not be for you – it really depends on why you buy it. The purchase of an Apple watch is partly motivated by the feeling of being part of the Apple community and having a fashionable piece of technology at the wrist – so that regular charging may seem like a small sacrifice.
Read our first impressions of the Apple Watch Series 4.
Garmin Vivoactive 3 (£ 210)
This GPS smart watch has many strengths, including a 240 x 240 pixel resolution on the touch screen, covered with Gorilla Glass, a multitude of sports, fitness and smart features, as well as NFC technology allowing for Make payments with Garmin compatible). If you are serious about sports training, its ability to take VO2 max measurements, using your heart rate to calculate your oxygen consumption and fitness level, may also be of interest. And it is compatible with Android smartphones and iPhones.
Garmin claims that the Garmin Vivoactive 3 will have a seven-day battery life in one charge. With GPS, this figure drops to 13 hours. Read our full review of Garmin Vivoactive 3 to find out how long the battery of this smartwatch has given us in our tests and if we were impressed by its other features.
Amazfit Beep (£ 60)
The Amazfit Bip is the first smartwatch you can buy in the UK from Chinese manufacturer Huami, which also manufactures Xiaomi devices. Huami says the Amazfit Beep will last up to 30 days with regular use and up to 45 days with a minimum of notifications. It's about 11 times longer than the Fitbit Versa (below).
It is lightweight and comfortable to wear. With its rectangular bezel, it looks like a member of the Apple family. There are not as many smart features as an Apple Watch or any other smart watch, but you can still receive text, calls, emails, and notifications on social networks. It has an integrated GPS, a range of decent fitness sensors, a heart rate monitor, a barometer to measure altitude and many more useful features.
At just £ 60, this could be a real deal. We reveal if this is the case or not in our complete article on Amazfit Bip.
Fitbit Versa (£ 178)
The Versa is Fitbit's second smart watch; the first was the Ionic, launched in 2017. Fitbit claims that the Versa (£ 178) will give you four days of autonomy per charge. You just have to recharge it twice a week.
The longer battery life means that, unlike the Apple Watch, you can use it to measure your sleep patterns (and, unlike the 4 Series, the Versa has a native app for that, who can even monitor sleep apnea).
The increase in battery life is partly due to the fact that there is no GPS, which means you can not leave your phone behind when you're away and you're still waiting for your phone shows the detects. The Versa does not have as many smart features as the Series 4 or the Galaxy Watch. Like the Amazif Beep, it allows you to receive SMS, calls, social network notifications and calendar, but not to respond.
Check out our Fitbit Versa review for our verdict.
Hybrid Smartwatches
We talked about smartwatches with rechargeable batteries because this is the most common type. Hybrid or analog smartwatches have replaceable batteries that can last up to two years.
Hybrid smart watches offer a myriad of smart features and formatting (a buzz when you receive an SMS or email on your smartphone, and sometimes a simple basic tracking, for example), but by no means as much as # 39, a real smart watch. Check out our guide to hybrid smart watches to learn more about them.
How to extend the battery life of your smartwatch
Here are some other ways to get the most out of your battery:
- Reduce the brightness of your screen. Opinions differ as to whether you should leave the Auto Brightness setting turned on, if any, to make the screen automatically darken when it is not necessary for you. he is super bright. On some watches, this will help, on others, he will use his battery by constantly testing the environment to determine if he needs to adjust. You may need to simply play with your watch and see what works best.
- Turn off the permanent screen. It's slightly annoying to have to lean your wrist or tap on the screen to get the time, but if you can live with it, do it. Also set a short expiry period.
- Disable smart notifications. Obviously, you would only want to do this for a short time, otherwise there is no point in having a smartwatch!
- Set your watch in airplane, theater or cinema mode, if necessary. This will send him to sleep until you wake him up again.
How? tests smart watches
For each smart watch we review, we test the battery life in different everyday scenarios, both in our lab and in the outside world. We send 11 phone calls and 35 SMS to the watch throughout the day, as well as many social network alerts.
We also check the time it takes for the battery to charge completely. Some spend 100% death in less than an hour, while others take up to three hours.
And we test how much juice you will get from a fast charge. So, if you leave soon and your smartwatch is dead, you know if it pays to pay it quickly. From some you will get up to 43%. For others, you will only get 19%.
A smartwatch must have a score of 72% to be which one? Best buy. Battery life accounts for 10% of that.
Check out our smartwatch reviews to make sure you spend your smartwatch money with the right battery life. Choose one that scores at least four stars out of five for the battery.
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