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Watch faces and battery

MiguelB
over 2 years ago

Hi, I have several questions about the watch faces and their battery consumption. In the default ones, many of them have seconds and cannot be removed. In others that are third party if you can remove the seconds and configure more, but I do not know if the fact of being third party implies that consume more battery or should be the same as long as you do not have many options such as counting steps, heart rate and everything that is screen updates.
In fact when I use the battery saving mode, the clock screen is what consumes me the most, that I only have a default one with the data of the steps nothing else.

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  • 0 over 2 years ago

    With watchfaces it's basically the things updating most on screen (requiring redrawing) that cost battery (seconds, heartrate). But these can be updated VERY efficiently, only a small part of the screen has to be redrawn. However, only one area can be redrawn like this. So if seconds and heartate are displayed very close together this area is small (using less battery) but if they are really far apart the are needed to redraw is larger (using more battery).

    That's with custom faces though, not sure about the factory ones.

    While custom watchfaces probably use a bit more then factory ones, when properly implemented it should hardly matter anything.

    For example, using 2 different custom watchfaces which show heartrate and/or seconds they use about 0.1-0.2%/hr

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    to build on 's excellent response. in my experience, the well written ConnectIQ faces can use as little or even less than the built in watch faces.

    i also think the number of fields being updated, even at lower frequency, comes into play. for example, Glance Pro, which i love, seems to consume more battery life than some other faces i like, even if HR and seconds are updated every second and/or only via gestures. i suspect that even with very good/efficient coding, this watch face uses more power because it is showing so many fields at once and the numbers shown and redrawn every minute take more battery than a face with smaller numbers being redrawn.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to derek87

    I used ActiFace watch face from Connect IQ on 945LTE, unfortunately not yet available for 955. 

    Looking forward for adding support by the author, the watch face is amazing also with other features, but the power consumption is very low.

    I don't display  seconds and actual heart rate with this watch face.