gear S3 Frontier battery life is horrible

[johnmcc0710]

Hi,

Is anyone else having issues with battery life on their Gear S3 Frontier?

I charged mine last night put it on this morning and I down to 73%. Last night it had 23% left after 14 hours or so. It is Verizon LTE.

Thanks

 

[pjniez]

I have never had battery issues with my Gear S3 (Bluetooth / Wi-Fi version) until this week. I leave it on my wrist and night to track my sleep and for the past 3 mornings, I woke up to the S3 battery in the teens. I'm pretty sure it was in the low 70s when I went to bed last night and when I woke up this morning, it was in the low teens and quickly dropped to 10% before I put it on the charger. I'm not sure what's going on with it all of a sudden. But it is really frustrating!

I have powered off Monday and Tuesday while it was charging and charged it to 100% both days. I am going to pay closer attention to it today.

I don't remember if I recently received an update. But I sure hope this gets fixed soon!

 

[johnmcc0710]

thanks for your reply. I starting to get frustrated with it. Updates should not do this.

 

[pjniez]

You're welcome!

BTW, there is another thread on the topic of high battery usage all of a sudden (within the past 3 days). Here is a link to it:
https://forums.androidcentral.com/samsung-gear-s3/916477-battery-life-suddenly-gone.html#post6370500

 

[yepitsmememe]

Hi,

Is anyone else having issues with battery life on their Gear S3 Frontier?

I charged mine last night put it on this morning and I down to 73%. Last night it had 23% left after 14 hours or so. It is Verizon LTE.

Thanks

I'm having the same issue with my Gear S3 Frontier. The problem with severe battery draining started about 2-3 days ago. I"m suspecting there was an update that changed things. I've turned off location services to see if that helps. Will update this post later today. My Gear S3 Frontier is the Bluetooth version (no LTE).

 

[bwilliamsky]

Similar issue. Mine is dying overnight while sleep tracking. To eliminate any possible issues, I fully reset my watch yesterday and did not restore from backup just to rule out any errant app that may have been loaded onto the watch.
I went to bed at 9:30p with a full charge and woke up at 4:45a. Within 10 minutes of getting out of bed, my watch displayed a low battery warning with the suggestion to enter battery save mode. I, too, have been dealing with battery issues since about 2 updates ago.

I contacted Samsung about this issue and they require a bench fee of $70, if I send my watch in, because my warranty has expired.

 

[racedog]

Add me also to the bad battery drain for the last three days. Before that the battery was ok (and only ok), but for the last three days the battery has been draining in just a few hours making the watch essentially useless.

 

[pjniez]

Similar issue. Mine is dying overnight while sleep tracking. To eliminate any possible issues, I fully reset my watch yesterday and did not restore from backup just to rule out any errant app that may have been loaded onto the watch.
I went to bed at 9:30p with a full charge and woke up at 4:45a. Within 10 minutes of getting out of bed, my watch displayed a low battery warning with the suggestion to enter battery save mode. I, too, have been dealing with battery issues since about 2 updates ago.

I contacted Samsung about this issue and they require a bench fee of $70, if I send my watch in, because my warranty has expired.

I'm glad you tried the factory reset and let us know that that didn't help the issue. Thank you! I was thinking of doing that also!

I am 99.999% sure that this is a software/firmware bug. Especially, since so many people are having the same problem within just the past few days. When you contacted Samsung, did they acknowledge the problem? If not, then I think more of us need to call to complain! Probably wouldn't hurt for all of us to call in either case to get them to fix this issue ASAP!

 

[bwilliamsky]

I'm glad you tried the factory reset and let us know that that didn't help the issue. Thank you! I was thinking of doing that also!

I am 99.999% sure that this is a software/firmware bug. Especially, since so many people are having the same problem within just the past few days. When you contacted Samsung, did they acknowledge the problem? If not, then I think more of us need to call to complain! Probably wouldn't hurt for all of us to call in either case to get them to fix this issue ASAP!

They did not... that said, I was dealing with tier 1 support and they're not going to do anything but offer the same troubleshooting steps posted everywhere online and create a service ticket.

I've seen discussion on the Samsung forum about a firmware release that's supposed to fix the battery drain issue (released for bluetooth models, releasing soon for lte models), which tells me they're aware that it's a software issue, but I've also read that the bluetooth firmware update still hasn't resolved the issue.

While I'm sure it can be blamed on aged battery because my watch is over 18 months old, that's debatable because it wasn't an issue at all and then after an update, it was markedly an issue. If this were a steady decrease in battery life, then sure, it could be a battery wearing out, but this all points to software glitches.

I'm doing some reading online now to see if anyone has tried installing a replacement battery.

 

[UState]

Is anyone having better luck today? Just got my Frontier on Sunday and it was great, then it went downhill.

Today seems to be good so far, I've only gone down 6% after 4 hours of having it on.

 

[pjniez]

They did not... that said, I was dealing with tier 1 support and they're not going to do anything but offer the same troubleshooting steps posted everywhere online and create a service ticket.

I've seen discussion on the Samsung forum about a firmware release that's supposed to fix the battery drain issue (released for bluetooth models, releasing soon for lte models), which tells me they're aware that it's a software issue, but I've also read that the bluetooth firmware update still hasn't resolved the issue.

While I'm sure it can be blamed on aged battery because my watch is over 18 months old, that's debatable because it wasn't an issue at all and then after an update, it was markedly an issue. If this were a steady decrease in battery life, then sure, it could be a battery wearing out, but this all points to software glitches.

I'm doing some reading online now to see if anyone has tried installing a replacement battery.

My S3 Frontier is about 10 or 11 months old. Bought before Christmas last year from Costco. Fortunately, I can return/exchange it there if necessary. But, I really don't think it is a battery issue. This battery drain issue started in the past three days for me. In fact, it may have started Sunday and the first I noticed it was Monday morning when I woke up. I have received a lot of software updates recently. I am sure it is one of them that is causing this issue.

It will be very disappointing if the firmware release that you saw mentioned online doesn't fix this. I was very annoyed not having my watch on this morning while waiting for it to charge for about 2 1/2 hours. It drove me crazy having to manually unlock my phone every frigg'n time I wanted to use it!!! :-(

 

[pappy35]

Chiming in here, there is NO way this could be anything other than a software issue. All these reports of radically reduced battery endurance from people who purchased their devices at all different times simply could not be some physical battery issue. What's the likelihood of all these batteries deciding to fail all on the same day? None. Clearly this is a software problem that Samsung needs to patch immediately. I've got a $350 paperweight at home. You'd think that after the Note 7 disaster they'd have learned by now how to respond quickly to these kind of DOA software updates.

 

[yepitsmememe]

I'm having the same issue with my Gear S3 Frontier. The problem with severe battery draining started about 2-3 days ago. I"m suspecting there was an update that changed things. I've turned off location services to see if that helps. Will update this post later today. My Gear S3 Frontier is the Bluetooth version (no LTE).

 

[tcmeiss]

Add me to the list. I even put mine in Battery Save mode before going to bed with about 80% the other night and still woke up with 9% left. I've had money since early spring (Bluetooth/wifi model, no LTE). I'm seeing the exact same issue everyone else is describing. I've also noticed that it seems to drain quickly after charging it unless I reboot it. Then it seems to slow down a bit.

 

[Yeniel Manduley]

Same issue here. Mine started 3 days ago. Battery last 6 hours .

 

[Soccerfan1309]

I have the Gear S3 Frontier paired to my S7 Edge and they are both losing almost all of their charge overnight. The culprits appear to be Samsung Health, Notifications on the watch and on the phone Samsung accessory service. I reset my watch yesterday and removed the related apps from my phone. Reinstalled everything on the phone and watch and last night it completely drained my watch and my phone again. I have currently removed the apps from my phone this morning and recharged my watch to 100%. Took off charger around 10am and I am currently at 88% at 5pm. Watch is not paired to anything.

 

[johnmcc0710]

I powered off my Gear 3 Frontier last night and charged it all night and turned it on this morning after almost 10 hours there is still 72% left so it is much better. I also turned on WiFi which I do not use at work on my phone. We shall see.

 

[Mattman86]

I started having the issue yesterday. Down to 10% in a little under 6 hours.

I read in the XDA forum about factory resets and decided to take a step further by doing this:
Hold in the power button in until 'Rebooting...' message.
Repeatedly press power button until boot menu shows.
Press the Home button until 'Recovery' is selected.
Press and hold the Power button until restart.
Set up watch as new watch not restoring backup.


After doing this, I'm down to 83% in 8 hours. This is with me playing around with it for about 20 minutes installing apps and changing settings.

Just over 2% per hour.

 

[pjniez]

My Gear S3 was on the charger all last night and I took it off this morning at about 8:50 AM EST. 13 hours later, I'm down to 15% and the watch is asking me to go into powersaving mode. Furthermore, I saw a post on the Gear S3 community forum from Samsung saying they are aware of th problem and a fix is coming in the coming weeks. This is ridiculous! I was hoping an issue that affects so many people all of a sudden could be fixed a lot sooner than in "coming weeks"!

 

[bbgpsuser]

I just posted the following in the other battery thread:

I had same issue crop up suddenly. During the day it would just gobble the battery. A couple of nights ago, while I was sleeping and wearing the watch in DND, the battery went from 100% to 23%.

Following the leads out on the internet, I confirmed that in Settings -> Apps -> "Samsung Accessory Service" was using A LOT of battery.
1. I went into the storage tab for "Samsung Accessory Service" and cleared the cache.
2. I deleted the "Galaxy Wearable" app.
3. I restarted my Gear S3.
4. I reinstalled the "Galaxy Wearable" app. It walked through reconnecting and resetting the Gear S3.

After that my Gear S3 battery use has been very low. It has been a day or two now and it seems that the problem is solved for me.