While Google confirmed last month that the Pixel Watch is on the way, there are still many things we don’t know about the device, such as its hardware specifications. However, rumors are buzzing and the fact is that the device will have a 300mAh battery and a wearable processor from the latest generation of Samsung. The latest report from 9to5 Google claims that the watch will last about 24 hours of battery life on a single charge and that fast charging is not in the mix. It may be tempting to cry for fate and darkness, but what if? These numbers are normal for the course.
Battery life remains one of the biggest challenges for smartwatch manufacturers. Try to put in a bigger battery to get more juice and you will eventually get a huge watch that turns off everyone with wrists. Try to design a thin and elegant watch and you will eventually get something that can barely last during the working day. Always add an on-screen display, an increasingly popular feature, and you’ll end up with even worse battery life. Try to cram as many advanced features as possible and watch how fast this battery discharges from 100 to zero percent.
This is a huge burden for consumers as well. If you want to track sleep, you need to have a smartwatch with a long enough battery life and / or fast charging. The same is true if you are an active person who does several hours of GPS activity a day. (This is one of the reasons why many marathoners choose Garmin, Polar or Coros over more “advanced” wearables.) This is also important for people who use their smartwatches to receive calls while on the go. .
The Fenix 7S has a spectacular battery life … but it also has solar charging, no OLED screen and no cellular connectivity. Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
When you combine all these factors together, the 24-hour Pixel Watch on a single charge is decent by today’s standards. I haven’t tested a Wear OS watch that lasts more than a day yet. Apple is left with an approximate 18-hour battery life for all its smartwatches – although many models will give you a little more than that. Samsung’s Tizen watches often ran around 24-48 hours, while the Galaxy Watch 4 is known for not reaching its estimated 40-hour battery life. Fitbit, meanwhile, was taking it out of the park when it came to battery life, but as displays were added to its latest trackers, it shrank to two to three days with the feature enabled.
Of course, you will find fitness watches with a battery life that exceeds a week – sometimes even a few weeks. I’ve been testing the Garmin Forerunner 255 for over a week with approximately five hours of GPS activity and I still have a 40 percent battery. However, this is because this watch gives priority to fitness tracking, has a low-power transflective screen and does not have many “smart” features. This is usually the case with multi-sport fitness watches.
Activating Google Assistant on the Galaxy Watch 4 has made the dark life of the watch’s battery even worse. Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
You can’t take your cake and eat it too – not yet. There is currently a feedback loop between battery life and the feature set of leading watches. The more features you want, the worse your battery life will be. If you want an OLED display always on, you’ll have to put up with frequent charging. If you want a digital assistant that can be triggered by an awake word? Unfortunately, you will have to be careful about charging. If you want to reliably track sleep, you will need a creative charging schedule.
The more features you want, the worse your battery life will be
The best solution so far was fast charging. If the rumors are true, the most disappointing thing is that fast charging is not on the table. On the other hand, this is also relatively new for high-end smartwatches. Fossil activates it for a while, but Fossil also has exactly one watch capable of cellular communication. (And it’s not even the latest model.) It took Apple until 2021 to get a really fast charge on the Apple Watch Series 7. It’s not possible on the Galaxy Watch 4. Probably a lot of smartwatch owners are quite accustomed to two hours of charging time, even if they are not the most satisfied with it.
If – and this is a big if – the Pixel Watch can control 24 hours with the display always on while listening to the Assistant in the background, that’s good enough. This is only a “bad” thing if Google fails to deliver a watch that can’t last a full day with approximately one hour of GPS activity. At the moment we just don’t know because we don’t have the final product in our hands. Until we do, it’s best to accept all the rumors about battery life and Pixel Watch performance with a great deal of disbelief.
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