I got my Style Silver last week and I have charged it a couple of times since. I wanted to share a few things I noticed:
- The battery gauge on the watch is very nice, with the mixed indication on the display and through the analog hands. However, it has no percentage shown and no segments in the icon battery to give a better visual feedback. It would be nice if Garmin added percentage markers to the "arc" displayed behind the analog hands.
- It would also be nice if the battery percentage be shown in the Garmin Connect app. Other trackers I have owned did that.
- The battery icon and the "arc" turn from green, to yellow to red as the battery discharges. The threshold from green to yellow seems to be roughly 25% battery left, red kicks in at what looks about 10%
- Just to run a very unscientific experiment, I charged the watch to 100% as soon as I took it out of the box, last Thursday. I used it until the following morning, topped it off again to 100% and then let it run until the display did not turn on anymore and the watch stopped synchronizing with my phone via Bluetooth.
- With PulseOX in-sleep On, vibration to Max and display brightness to "Auto", the battery lasted for over three and half day, from Friday morning until Monday evening. That included one or two 30-45 minutes walk/run every day, recorded with the connected GPS (which I suppose draws more current from the battery). I believe that is pretty good, considering I did nothing to minimize power consumption. I never take off the watch other than when I shower, so that is when I charge it usually, every day. For my typical use, almost four days on a charge is more than what I need.
- I was very pleased to see that the watch continued to operate normally (including the display and all of the sensors), until the battery indicator got basically to zero. When I went to bed on Sunday night it was in the yellow zone. Monday morning at 7:00am, when I got up, it was in the red and the watch did not shut down the display until 5:30pm that evening (and that included another recorded walk in the morning). The last 10% or so of battery in the red zone lasted then for at least 10 hours. Occasionally a message on the display reminded it was time to charge. In any case, there is plenty of margin from when the watch enters the red battery zone to when it shuts down.
Hope the results of this simple empirical test can be useful. Although I did not get the "up to 5 days" mentioned by Garmin, they do not specify what settings they used to come up with that. I suspect with PulseOX in-sleep Off and with vibration not on max. With the modern batteries used in today's gadget it is better to charge a little and frequently anyway, rather than letting the battery run down until it dies every single charge cycle. Since that is my usage pattern, I am not obsessing over getting 5 days on a charge.
Coming from two and half year with a Vivomore HR, I am so far pleased with the Style.
