Battery lasting <24 hours

I have been testing this for about 2 weeks now and am completely convinced it's watchfaces, which Garmin support also agrees with.

I can literally give examples of faces that are guaranteed to cause your watch to freeze, drain battery, and turn GPS on when indoors.

Interestingly enough, my favorite face was updated by the developer and works great without any issues. Tried swapping back to the other faces and boom, instant issues. The Garmin stock faces also have zero issues from my use so... I even tried jim_m_58's faces with no issues as credit to him (which is likely why he always chimes in saying there is no way the face is causing an issue.)

Folks are free to disagree, but I feel it's definitive at this point. You can also read the reviews on CIQ and see the problems people are reporting on the ones that I had issues with lol.

Which watch faces do you recommend?

My battery use is sporadic, from the next charge onwards I'm going to track the usage. Losing 10% battery for a gym workout seems wrong. I don't use rep counting and just leave the app alone. It uses more power than GPS though.

It will be interesting to see some hard and fast numbers that I'm getting. I will then decide if I'm keeping it or not. The only issue being that I sold my vivoactive hr. That thing had great battery life. Let's hope the next update sorts it out.

This has just started happening to me. Not changed anything recently and always use the default watch face, but twice now in the last week, the watch has lost its charge in less than a day. Previously it would last a week or more...

EDIT: And it's just recharged from 0-100% in an hour or so. Is this typical (I usually charge it overnight) or might it be that the VA3 only *thinks* the battery is low, when in fact it has plenty of juice remaining?

I always have BT on, and usually I don't see unusual battery drain. However, it seems like if I do an activity (ie cycle or use the broadcast HR) then after the next charge it will see the higher battery usage rate. Unless I do a full reboot (hold the button down) then it will be the &amp;lt;1% usual rate.

my basic set up is
default watch face
BT on
back light 0%
gestures/sideswipe off
HR is on
smart recording

but yesterday was weird while I was at work, charged to full at 7 am, at noon was 94%, but at 4pm got a low battery buzz, and looked and it was down to 13% and by the time i got home just after 5pm it was 6%. I didn't do anything, except sit at a desk all day (didn't even come close on my step goal!)

edit: anyone else notice that the 2.90 Download page isn't linking anymore? i get no software found today??
http://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=12527

I've been using the VA3 for the past 2.5 months and the battery life is extremely finicky. It once dropped 50% in 4 hours and I had a dead watch around my wrist for the entire day at work. The best battery life I've been able to squeeze is 5 days during the second week of usage, these days I average around 2.5 days. It has the latest software update. I use the "no frills" watch face and I don't have any other watch face or widget installed. I also contacted Garmin support and opened a case 6 weeks ago and provided all sorts of logs off the watch. Called them last week and was told, the engineers are still looking. The customer service rep did confirm that some VA3 customers are having battery life issues with the VA3 and they haven't been able to figure out if this is a software or hardware issue.

For comparison purposes, a month ago I bought a Fenix5, the battery life is amazing. I have the same "No frills" watchface and I got 17 days out of it!.. it is even better than advertised. The only downside is that it is 3x more expensive. Incoming whatsapp message behaviour on Fenix5 is weird as it sometimes shows the real message but most of the time just displays the generic message "1 new message", this never happens on the VA3. Lastly, still getting used to the lack of touchscreen, I find the buttons a bit odd.

I wish they had a VA3 with Fenix5 form factor and battery life + touchscreen... but for now the Fenix5 stays and VA3 goes back to Costco.

How is the Fenix5 as a watch? Can you wear it in the boardroom (if you have a boardroom) or does it attract "Action Man" comments? One of the main reasons I bought the VA3 was that it could pass as an ordinary watch.

Trust me, your wife may not have noticed it on your wrist but she would have found out when she saw the extra $$ spent on the credit card! ;)

To the point, I tried a Suunto sport wrist trainer -- which I'm pretty sure is less weight and size than F5 -- and I definitely noticed this. For me, VA3 is as big a watch without the "action man" look. But that's all subjective and you should just test/try for yourself. (I will also say I returned the Suunto b/c screen visibility was horrible).

Thanks. To be fair, my wife is cool about stuff like this, but I'm not so sure about my clients. The VA3 fits under shirt-cuffs (just) and doesn't look at all macho.

The problem I have have with the Fenix range is that they are specialty items, while the VA3 I was able to try on in a High Street shop. I really want to make sure this technology really works for me in the long term, before committing more money to it.

What kind of co-workers or clients do you people have that would make comments such as action man or macho and more importantly, why would you care? Is this some kind of corporate dress code?