please in the first thanks for your support and advance i want to purchase vivoactive 3 but i heard this watch have an issue related to battery life, i need your tips before to purchase vivoactive 3
No big battery issues here either. Only time it seems to drain quickly is if I have a downloaded watch face in use that displays weather or will turn GPS on for whatever reason. Otherwise I get 4 days with fairly decent usage.
Battery life is fine with my VA3, unless I'm using the GPS. This happened with FR235's when they first came out and a FW update corrected it. There have been enough post; and I suspect emails to support, that this will be fixed soon.
Picked up my brand new vivoactive 3 from the store Saturday afternoon (25Nov). During set up it did some sort of automatic update. Charged to 100% mid evening yesterday, now 13.30 local time it is down to 51% after about 14 hours. I've worn it most of the time since charging and GPS has only been on for a 48 minute bike ride just now. I'd read about this and other problems prior to purchase but thought they'd been fixed with firmware updates.
I'll investigate whether it needs another update and report back later.
BTW, I'm overall very happy with the watch, just surprised that the battery life is still an issue. My first Garmin (which this replaces) is a May 2005 Forunner 301 which still works and records GPS and HR data. After about 12 years the display started failing so I've no visual feedback whilst riding until I get home and upload the ride into the PC. I can confidently operate it by listening to the beeps it makes. The other thing that failed after about 9 years was the connectors on the HR chest strap. After several attempts with duct tape and other adhesives I finally made a permanent fix using woven glass fibre tape embedded into epoxy resin. This is now a "step into" belt as it is a permanent loop. After waiting 24 hours for the epoxy to cure I went for a ride whilst it was still slightly tacky. Body heat cured it and two hours later I had a very painful "waxing" as two rectangular sections of chest hair (and probably a bit of skin) were removed when the belt came off. Don't you just hate to throw stuff out whilst it still works!
For the battery thing, one easy thing to try is to hold the button for 15-20 seconds (until the watch turns itself off), and then turn it back on. It's kind of a "full reboot". You don't lose anything, but sometimes fixes things like this.
