Samsung Gear S3 Frontier: Battery

One of the reasons most people shy away from smart watches is the assumed battery life such a device could have. Some of the fancy, higher tech devices require a charge every day and a half – which ultimately means you are charging every night to avoid it dying mid day. Even watches that claim to track your sleep become unusable as most individuals are popping them on the chargers overnight, limiting some of the watches functionality that consumers paid for. So far, after about a month with the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier,  I haven’t run into a single battery issue, and getting the advertised 3 days on a single charge seems pretty close to legitimate. Lets break down my use, and how that in turn affects battery life.

Because it is winter here in Southwestern Ontario, I’m not getting out and about as much as I would like, so I’ve actually never had many of the watches features working all at once – for instance, during a 30-40 minutes run – so I won’t be able to comment on that until this spring. Understandably, running the Samsung S Health application, along with a music app and other health and fitness apps, could potentially kill my battery faster than it does now.

I’m most aware of my watches battery during my regular, weekday routines. They break down as follows:

• 11:oo PM till 7:20 AM: my watch is utilizing the sleep tracking mode, determining my sleep efficiency, how often I wake up, etc.
• 7:20 till 9:00 AM: I’m moving about the house, prepping lunches for myself and kids, making breakfast, and jetting kids out the door to the bus for school.
• 9:00 AM till 5:00 PM: Desk work, and lots of it. Generally, I get out of the office about once a day on a quick errand.
• 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM: Dinner and playing with my kids, putting them to bed. Sometimes involves physical activity which gets the watching going, but other times is very sedentary.
• 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM: Movies, TV, Video Games

During the winter months, I’m really not doing a whole lot to make the best use of this smart watch from Samsung. Often at my desk during the day, I will quietly play music through watch itself, as the great ineternal speaker at low levels rivals my phone, but as I move about he office, I like having my music with me wherever I go. The rest of the day, my watch notifies me of my personal emails coming in, updates to all my applications – podcasts, Twitter, Facebook Messages, etc. – and allows me to quickly input my calories using the downloadable Under Armour My Fitness Pal application.

Even in this sedentary lifestyle, the watch is always working. Calculating those few steps I take per day, monitoring my heart rate and activity levels, and of course, pushing all my notifications to me. With this current lifestyle, how much time can I squeeze out of my Samsung Gear S3 Frontier, using medium brightness, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth? Roughly 3 days, as advertised by Samsung.

Three days really is a sweet spot, and sometimes I stretch it out, but more often than not, I take advantage of down time to get a quick charge on my device. During those late evening hours, for example, when I know I’ll just be kicking back on the couch, I’ll plop the device unto the charge stand as it is doing very little work on my wrist at that time. Ultimately, as I become more active, I’m going to assume that battery life will diminish ever so slightly. Still, even at 2 to 2 1/2 days, for what it does, the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier is outperforming a number of other watches on the market.

For more info on the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier, be sure to check out the website!