Watchface: M2

Yes, I have noticed the same behavior on my new (2 weeks old) Vivoactive 4S.

I originally tried the default M2 configuration and noticed the battery life was worse than the stock Garmin watchfaces. Just to have a consistent measurement, I checked battery percentages when going to bed and checking percentages again when I get up. In my case, M2 drained well over twice the amount of the battery compared to the stock watchface.

On the following day I tested a very minimal M2 config I found in this forum (just the hour, hour + minutes on gesture). It did better than M2 default config during the night, but still worse than stock Garmin watchface (even with seconds always on).

I also tried two popular Connect IQ watchfaces and I got similar (bad) results compared to stock, even when stripping away many features. I understand Connect IQ watchfaces will never be as performant as the default ones, but I didn't think it would be that off.

Really hope that Garmin team finds a fix for this.

PS: I wonder if Garmin does some clever tricks to reduce the battery usage during night. For instance, if I'm sleeping during the night (low heart rate, no movement) it might not redraw the screen that often.

I agree with battery problem, more detailed wf more usage...

Anyway, I got my Darth Vader (Based on Vivoactive 4) 5 days ago, since then I was looking for an app to personalize the wf. M2 is really great even though I couldn't make the simulator work on PC. An error always says "couldn't find the simulator.exe"

That's my WF, I loved the ones Lucien and mcnano#21 did. But I changed it a little bit, I hope it's not problem for Lucien.

I have question about power saver mode. I want to see another wf, simpler and cleaner one after  a min. of no touch. Is that possible?

First

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Second

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Great design! I‘ve made some changes - added week number, battery % and distance, moved the steps count to the bottom. I must say, I like your design, it makes the screen look bigger. 

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• Glad you like it. You gave me some ideas for improvements :-) 

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Made some changes inspired by your version 

First:

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Second:

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nullundnada

4022840

Ouch 1% per hour is a big difference from 0.5%!

I think it's normal that the stock Garmin watchfaces are (at least a bit) more efficient than the CIQ ones, but it sounds like something has changed if a lot of people are experiencing a similar drain on the Vivo 4 and 4s.

I've tried a test on my own watch (Fenix 5X+) running M2 over a 2 day period and it is now at 86% - and that is exactly the value I'm used to seeing because I tend to recharge every 2 or 3 days after exercise (in my predictable routine!). So on the Fenix 5X+ at least battery drain seems not to have changed.

I'm sure Garmin will be aware of the problem and looking into it - hopefully they can find it and fix it soon!

Holydao

I'm not sure exactly how the touch screen watches like yours work ... when you touch the screen does it go into high power mode and update every second for 10 seconds? (The same as if you use a glance gesture to look at your watch?)

If it does switch the CIQ watchfaces between high power & low power in the same way, then you can turn on & off individual elements or whole fields in M2 by using the "visibility" option in the menus - and you can change it to "Gesture active" (which is high power mode) or "Gesture not active" (low power mode). In this way you can have some things only visible in one mode and some things only visible in the other mode.

Note that for instance you can set the visibility of an icon element to be "phone connected", and then set the field visibility to "gesture active" - so the icon will only be visible if both are true!

There is also a slightly more advanced method - in the Garmin settings (e.g. in Garmin Connect Mobile app) when you enter and save the profile text for M2 you can enter a "Gesture Profile" setting in there too. What this does is when the watchface is in high power mode, M2 will switch to displaying the profile this specifies, and then it will return to the normal profile when it goes back to low power mode again. You can try setting the Gesture Profile to be 25 as a test and see if it works - this is the default profile for M2.

If it does work then you can save whatever profile you like to one of the custom slot numbers (e.g. 2), and then set the gesture profile of your normal profile (which is in slot 1) to be 2.

(Note that each profile stores its own linked gesture profile - so profile 1 can have a gesture profile set to 2, and profile 3 can have a gesture profile set to 4, and each will switch to the correct gesture profile depending on which one is being used.)

Hopefully this works

Thanks for instant reply 

Yes, it's the same, when you touch the screen or press any button it illuminates the screen and you can see the seconds in real time (1 hz) for 10 seconds. After that illumination stops and I want to see a simpler wf for power save. Doesn't that sound good? 

I didn't think too much on gesture settings by the way, I will give it a try. 

I just used visibility for phone icon when connected to phone and bed icon for DND.

Thank you again by the way, app is great