Wear OS Diary 2020- week of 1/27/2020

As an android user there really is no "default" smartwatch. There are many options that you can use for example we have Samsung gear watches, Fitbit versas, and Garmin watches. Although these watches are all well and good I'm here to talk about the watch OS made by Google: Wear OS. In this series of articles, I'm going to tell you my weekly impressions about the Fossil Sport smartwatch, a watch running the latest version of Wear OS, latest processor the snapdragon 3100. Along with other nifty features such as heart rate monitoring and other fitness bonuses along with "swim-proofing"(water resistance up to 5 ATM). Expect to see this series be posted at the beginning of the week and get updated throughout the week.

 Unboxing  

The box came with a charger, a watch, and a user guide. I immediately booted up the watch and paired it to my phone(the setup process can take from 5 to 10 minutes) and began installing apps. 

At first, the watch felt a tad slow and janky, the animations would lag and tiles almost wouldn't load up, but I soon realized it was because I had taxed the ram and processor too much by trying to install a million things at once. I let the watch handle itself and left it charging overnight to install a system update and sort out the apps.    

 Out in the Wild

The very next day I was out and about, going to stores and other well-lit locations the screen on the watch was vibrant and bright although was a little bit hard to see in direct sunlight (note: Once I changed the brightness settings to automatic the screen was easier to see in sunlight). Everything mostly worked well with smooth animations and performance. The reason I say mostly is that there was a bug where I couldn't respond to a call from the watch, I think this was a short-term bug because it only happened once so I'm pretty optimistic it won't happen again. One major drawback I saw was battery life *sighs*. I know Wear OS hasn't had the best reputation when it comes to battery life, but on my early testing is seemed to drain quickly. I was thankfully able to get through the day, but by the time I went to sleep the watch had 4% battery left. I will do more battery tests with more statistics and real-world timing along with changes to settings so this is not the complete battery report(expect to see the full battery report at the end of the month).

Always-On Battery life

Toward the end the week I was testing out custom ways to reserve battery life but most of what I tried either didn't really help or limited the watch.  I was trying to think of new options when I noticed my brother was getting significantly better battery life than I was.  I asked him what he was doing right and I found the battery life-saving setting.  *These settings apply to fossil watches* I swiped down the quick settings page and tapped on the battery+ icon, a menu popped up with several battery options including Daily, Extended, Custom, and Time Only.  I tapped on daily and never looked back, over the next days I got the best battery life I have seen on a Wear OS watch.  For the first day I was able to get 15 hours of battery life, I could have gotten even more hours because I had 27% left by the time my first day ended.  The next day I had the exact same battery life but I had 42% left in the tank by the time that day ended.  The daily mode enables almost all the features, most important of all features though is the ability and privilege of an always on screen.  Having an always-on screen for the past few days have made my smartwatch experience so much better.  On previous Wear OS watches an always-on screen severely depleted the battery life so i'm pleasantry surprised to see the feature implemented in such an efficient way.  Thanks to these new settings my issue with battery life has been solved and my experience has been improved, so google and fossil:thumbs-up to you👍.