Battery Life in Smartwatch Mode

Same issue with mine. It's my first Garmin and I've probably not set it right but after its first charge on Monday evening, I am at 29%, wearing it simply in "lifestyle" mode - no workouts. I have a simple watch face called No Frills, for which I removed the live seconds. I have several widgets like Altimeter, Barometer, Temperature turned on (and when I enter those widgets I see the data for the last several hours) and the Pulse Oximeter is turned on to take a measurement when I sleep.

I'll keep digging to stop these sensors from being always on - I don't need constant measurement for Altimeter and Barometer or Temp but would like to see those only on demand.

So far, not happy with the battery life, but I'm blaming me not knowing how to set it up properly rather than the watch.

I'm glad it isn't just me. Honestly the widgets shouldn't be causing the drain. I have them active on my 935 and they don't cause a problem. The pulse ox I have heard does drain the battery .. but mine is off. I would like to hear what Garmin has to say about this

But on the bright side I only used about 3% of the battery during my 1hr run yesterday with trihrm and phone connected

I have some friends with the 935 and indeed the battery seems to last longer. As I said, it's my first device and I'm still learning all the features but I'm pretty sure the battery should last more than 7 days since they advertise 14.

For those of you who are seeing higher battery drain I'll throw out my experience with the Fenix 5 Plus line which has had lots of battery life complaints.

I bought myself a Fenix 5 Plus Sapphire for my birthday back in December because I stumbled across it super cheap on eBay. It was only after that, when reading the forum for the watch, that there were a lot of battery life complaints and the watch I bought was suffering with the problem too. I tried a couple of remedies that were listed on the forum which didn't really help much.

It turns out the combination of size and weight of the F5+ is too much for my skinny wrist but I really liked the watch so I bought a F5S+ new and hoped the battery would be okay. It wasn't.

But I persevered knowing that in the past I've had Garmin watches that didn't start getting their claimed battery life until after a couple of charge cycles. And sure enough, after a lot more cycles than past watches need, it started getting roughly the life that it was supposed to. So I pulled out the full size F5+ and started wearing that when I put the smaller Fenix on to charge and it too eventually started getting the claimed battery life.

I'm not claiming that this is what's going on with this model but it's what I experienced on another recent model but it's not what happened for everybody who had battery issues with the F5+.

Thanks! I have heard that. I'm hoping after a few more full charges that I'll notice an improvement

Coming form the 935 i can say that indeed battery seems worse then the 935. I did a hard factory reset and that seems to help a bit and i did turn off PulseOX.  Hopefully it will be fixed with a firmware update.

I've had my 945 for a week now coming from the F5. I still haven't managed to do a full battery cycle due to messing about, map updates etc. But the reported daily battery drain is already much better than it was a week ago.

If memory serves me rightly, this was similar to the F5. Until you did a few full cycles the battery level reporting didn't seem to calibrate properly.

I've had a Fenix 5x plus for a year.  Using smartwatch mode and 2 hrs per week of GPS activities, I get 14 days on a charge.  I don't have the pulse ox on, and backlight is manual.  I'm planning to get the 945, so I hope it'll be comparable.