Battery LIfe

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@steff he is not the only one claiming this. Among other users there are test reports and automations

Steff

@Steff I must use 3rd party sync services to get my data into Suunto?
Why - there is no need to - if you have correctly set up your watch and are using the suunto app this all flows through properly with no issues.

I mentioned that I need 3rd party sync services if I’m using GFit instead of Suunto, not the way around.

What firmware version are you on? Only the very first initial firmware versions had this sync issue and had higher battery drain on activities.

I’m on the latest firmware, PXDZ.210326.002.A2

Have you tried the walking activity instead of the hiking one - that is the one I usually use and I am at worst 10hrs best 15hrs tracking life.

Yes, I tried both walking and hiking activities.
There was no noticeable difference in terms of battery life.

The only thing that I did not tried is to factory reset the watch.
I will try that today.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@steff I dont get some of the arguments here

Why import back from Google FIT is a Suunto responsibility in a way of “demand”

Regarding connected GPS (using the phone GPS) its about accuracy issues and connectivity issues. S7 is a watch as well and that decision is in the specs of the device.

Steff

@dimitrios-kanellopoulos I think I was misunderstood.
I said that using GFit to track activities has the disadvantage of needing 3rd party sync to get the data into Sunnto, not that is Suunto fault that GFit does not upload activities into Suunto.

Jamie BG

@steff thanks for the clarification - I certainly wasn’t reading your original comment that way.

I think you need to consider a reset as your battery lfe consumption definitely isn’t standard and what most of us experience.

Steff

I factory reset the watch, configured it without installing any 3rd party app or watchface (installed updates for all preinstalled apps, set up GFit and Suunto App).

I first made a 1h18min walk (Best GPS, DND, airplane mode, keys locked) and I got an estimation of 10h4min
Today I made 3h52min hike with the same settings and I got an estimation of 9h01min

I’m pleased with these results.
I think it was something wrong with the SuuntoApp from the watch, probably because I went though 2 system updates since I got the watch.
Thank you all for your suggestions.

Unfortunately, now I have other 2 problems:

The GPS track looks terrible even though I used Best GPS.

Here is what it looks on S7

and here is how it looks on a Samsung Watch Active 1, also from today:

here is how the same area looks on a Samsung Gear S3, from last year:

I’m starting to believe what @olymay suggested, that is something wrong with my GPS chip.
Not sure if I will send the watch to warranty they will want to do anything, being something difficult to check.

The watch has a very hard time to pick up my HR.
I noticed this on several occasions on the past hikes, but I didn’t paid to much attention.

Today I was more attentive:

here is after 10min of starting the hike, climbing, barely breathing and with my heart pumping like crazy.
I don’t have 96 bmp not even walking slowly on flat surfaces

only after another 2 minutes the watch picked my HR and it jumped to 160

This happened several times during the hike, especially after resting.

I tried moving the watch up on my wrist, tighten the strap but not too tight, but with no results.

I finding strange because I didn’t had such problems with none of my previous watches.
Seems to be more a software problem than a sensor problem.

aeroild

@aeroild said in Battery LIfe:

On two different Suunto 7 watches I typically get an estimate of between 7 and 8 hours on both runs and walks. Best estimate being as much as 9 hours 25 minutes on a trail run. I also checked a mountain bike ride I did yesterday and the estimated battery life is over 12.5 hours!

I did another test today: 1 hour 36 minute walk with best GPS and flight mode. Battery went from 15% to 2%. Estimated battery life 12 hours 23 minutes! I am very pleased with that!

olymay

@steff YAY! Great news that your battery life seems to better, I’m really pleased

Regarding the GPS track, it cannot de directly to the other watches, as they look incredibly smooth, so are either sampling at much higher rates, or are applying some smoothing to the track.
I notice that the two tracks you are comparing to are both Samsung devices, so maybe there is something happening to the signal afterwards (in a similar way to Samsung over-processing their photos to make them look super saturated…).

Something to bear in mind is that GPS typically has an accuracy of roughly 10 metres, and this can change as you move around, as obstacles get in the way (tress, buildings, clouds), or even as the satellites them solves move around.
I do a lot of sailing with high end GPS devices with HUGE antennas and even they are not perfectly accurate, so a dinky watch our wrists is never going to be spot on perfect.

Here is a link to a run I did at the weekend with GPS on bets mode.
At times, the GPS is spot on, at times it has me running through buildings or on the canal. This is perfectly normal for any GPS and in fact is the best I have seen from a wrist based device that does not piggy back the phone. (There are some detours from paths that I did take in order to avoid sheep, cows, ramblers, or just to enjoy the scenery).

The HR I can offer less info about. Wrist based optical HR is finicky at best. There are so many factors that can affect it - skint type, skin colour, freckles, how hairy you are, sweat, and many more.
Without knowing how you wear it or how tight (if it helps I have mine tight enough to leave an imprint of the HR sensor, but I can still slide one finger inside the strap) then it’s impossible to tell. Some people just don’t get on with certain sensors.
Maybe compare to a chest HR sensor?

Before 24/7 HR was added it was crucial to wait for a solid HR lock, but now I find that the HR is spot on as soon as the activity starts.
Do you have 24/7 HR turned on? If not, do you wait for for the HR symbol to become solid at the start of an activity?

Grillo54

@olymay
I like to share my experience about battery life and GPS precision,
I use my S7 by 3-4 months and i know by myself battery life it is a big issue of this nice watch so i dont use anything else than sport utilities , no sleep and day cardio monitoring fo example ….so this sunday i made a trekking 1250m delevel rest on the top of mountain for 1 h when i come back around 6 h after trekking start my S7 was out of battery , but this is not the only problem cose the altimeter for all the trekking was wrong about 150 m down you can see the top of mountain i was Cima delle Saline is 2612m and my s7
Tell it is 2460
I think that the 2 problems are too much for a good sportwatch , i like to repeat the watch was fully charged at start trekking and i dont use any smartwatch functions to save battery for sportfunctions
I like to know yor opinions
Agostino

Martin Vrska

@grillo54 I recommend turning off the GPS in the watch during rest.

Grillo54

@martin-vrska i agree i had to turn off gps during rest but Suunto say 12 h gps , mine S7 was out of battery in half time 6 h

Martin Vrska

@grillo54 Suunto probably thinks with GPS “good” - 10s…

olymay

@grillo54

Something definitely doesn’t seem right with your battery life.

In activities that I have done, I typically get 7% battery drop per hour when using GPS GOOD and 10% drop per hour on GPS BEST.
Even if I factor in some extra battery use due to smartwatch features or my actions, I would still expect to get 8-10hrs of GPS use on BEST mode.

If you are tracking I believe GPS defaults to GOOD (I may be wrong so please check this) and this should give you plenty of battery life.

Do you use the map screen on the watch much during your activity? As activating the map screen brings the watch out of the low power mode and puts it into full power mode. This will have a big hit on battery life. Occasional checks are negligable, as I sometimes do this when on a new route, but the more you check it the more it hits the battery. And if you have it set to map always on, kiss goodbye to battery life.

Are you following a route? If so, do you have waypoints? As again, the (excessive) notifications around waypoints bring the watch into high power mode.

Finally, please excuse my ignorance here, but you have bought a smartwatch and then turned off all of the smart features to try and turn it into a sports watch? Why not buy a sports watch in the first place? If you do not need or want the smart features then the S7 is maybe not the watch for you.
But if you do want a smartwatch and all the features that come with it, then the S7 has one of the best batteries of any smartwatch on the market.

hello,
first post, first trail run with the S7.
Thank you so much for all the helpful tips I have read in this forum.

6 hours,
gps 10" + FT,
airplane mode,
several quick glances at the map

battery went from 100% to 63%.

best,

rooldaa

Hello,

Yesterday I noticed the very strange behavior of the battery.

During a shower, I put my watch on the charger and got from 3 to 30 percent of battery. It was around 10 pm. When I went to sleep at 1 am it was still 30%. And during the night the watch took ONLY 3% - 8 hours sleep.

The settings:

Pulse 24/7 - ON
Sleep - ON
Airplane mode - ON
AoD - OFF
Tilt-to-wake - OFF
Powersaver tilt - OFF

Basically, these are my usual night setting. So, nothing was different.

And now see the battery graph from the Wear OS app on the phone.

It tells that during the night the watch somehow was being charged)))

olymay

@rooldaa Is it possible that the watch lost connection with WearOS at the end of charging it? So when it did re-establish connection the battery was a little higher than it had been at the point of last connection and therefore it simply drew a straight line between the two? In a similar way to losing and re-establishing GPS and drawing a straight line between the points?

Either that or you are a human charging pad

rooldaa

@olymay Hi,

As I remember during the whole charging process connection with the phone was still there. And during the night airplane mode was ON, so there is no chance that the watch was somehow connected to the phone and made that straight line you mentioned.

So, it could be that right after charging the watch showed me the wrong number. Maybe it was 35% instead of 30% It happens sometimes and I am aware of that. But I checked the battery status during the evening at least a couple of times because I noticed that I still have 30%))

And it doesn’t explain why only 3% were consumed during the night.
And for the record - that shower was not too long)) I couldn’t charge the watch too high anyway.

I wish It happened more often))

olymay

@rooldaa looking at the graph the max charge point jumps straight across to the new peak, so it looks like there was no connection to the phone post charging. Which device had aeroplane mode on? I guess it doesn’t really matter as this would explain the lack of connection from the watch to the phone and likely explains the apparent jump in battery life.

On a side note, if you put the watch into aeroplane mode at night, why don’t you use theatre mode instead? It maintains the connection to the phone but puts the watch into do not disturb, and turns off any tilt/touch to wake for the screen (buttons still activate it though).

rooldaa

@olymay I don’t use theater mode because when the alarm starts working I have to open the alarm app manually in order to shut it off. It drives me crazy. And why do I need to maintain the connection during the night in the first place? Doesn’t it consume more battery?

olymay

@rooldaa Weird, I use theatre mode and when the alarm goes off I simply have to press a button on the watch to turn the screen on and the alarm is showing on the screen straight away. If I press the button too many times in my tired state (I always press the home button to wake it up) then I just have to swipe up the notifications and it is in there.

Maybe this is because I use the alarms on my phone and they are simply repeated across to the watch? If you want a silent alarm you can still do this by setting the phone to no alarm tone and no vibration

Honestly, I don’t think it uses much more battery at all, maybe 1% overnight at most. The Bluetooth connection is very low power and as the screen and vibrations are off they don’t use anything. The biggest drain is sleep tracking and HR, but again they don’t use much I find.

I like to keep the devices connected as much as possible as it keeps everything up to date and stops oddities (like your battery gain situation) from happening.

Maybe give theatre mode a try and see if it works for you? I like that it is a one stop action for screen off and do not disturb. Although it is a pain if I forget to turn it off in the morning and then wonder why I’m not getting any notifications through

I would love it if the watch auto went into theatre mode when it detected you are asleep, and then deactivates it once you are awake.