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Liking the Vivoactive 3 but not the battery life

Former Member over 7 years ago

My wife picked me up a Vivoactive 3 for Christmas to replace my aging Vivosmart HR+. While I'm really liking the new device, the battery life is not coming anywhere close to the "Up to 7 days" Garmin projects. The first charge lasted about 2.5 days and it looks like this most recent charge will stretch to maybe 3 days.

I haven't used the GPS and likely won't until warmer weather when I can take the kayak out. I do work out daily on the treadmill nightly for about an hour. To help conserve power I've dialed down the screen brightness, turned off the automatic back-light, minimized how long the backlight is on and cut back on the number of notifications my iPhone generates.

Am I missing any other tricks to make the most out of the battery's life? Will the battery life slowly improve as I use the Vivoactive 3 or is it best to buy a few more charging cables for the office and car?

0 R_Tellis over 7 years ago

I've seen battery life be poor for the first charge cycle after a firmware update. Sometimes a simple hard restart squares it away others it takes waiting until getting down to about 20% doing a full recharge and power off/on.

Also keep in mind that even though you're not using GPS when in activity mode using the wrist HRM the monitor will draw more power than it does when in 24/7 mode.

For the most part I use a different watch when I run or cycle outside but use the VA3 for gym workouts which amount to about 45 minutes a day during the week and I recharge between 20-25 percent which means about every 3 days. When I was taking some down time after my fall marathon and the watch was used pretty much just as a watch it was more like 5 days.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Make sure you have the newest software update. When I got my watch a couple weeks ago, my watch and mobile app said there was no update, but when I connected the watch to the PC app (Garmin Express), it updated. Battery life is MUCH better now.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Make sure you have the newest software update. When I got my watch a couple weeks ago, my watch and mobile app said there was no update, but when I connected the watch to the PC app (Garmin Express), it updated. Battery life is MUCH better now.

Yep. I had two updates since taking the VA3 out of the box.