- Jul 3, 2011
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I got my Moto 360 last Tuesday. During the weekdays I had to charge it on my Qi charger about noon. But the real test was on Saturday. My wife and I were in Santa Barbara just sight seeing. It was a bad experience. By 4pm my Note 3 was down to 5% battery and the watch was about 15%. I pulled out my spare Note 3 battery and put it in the phone, something I've only done twice before during the last 11 months of owning the phone. I put the watch in airplane mode. The phone, oddly, lasted the evening until 11:30 when we got home. It was just a watch but it worked for 7 hours on that last 15%.
That's when it occurred to me. There must be something going on between the watch and phone. That something was either a lot of bluetooth activity or an app keeping a conversation going or both. So, I decided to take a radical approach. On Sunday afternoon I did a factory reset of the Moto 360 and a factory reset of the Note 3. A radical approach, to be sure, but I was formally trained in the Scientific Method and needed to freeze all the variables to a known state. I would install only Android Wear and Motorola Connect. No other outside apps. I did install other apps on the phone but no more related to the phone.
So, here is my result, one day into this radical experiment. I took the watch off the charger at 5:30 am. The phone went off it's charger at 6:00am. It's now 6:30pm, 13 hours after I first picked up the watch. My day was normal with the same amount of notifications as the past week. The result? The Moto 360's battery indicates that it's at 49%. I have full confidence that it will make it until it goes back on the charger at 10pm.
My conclusion is that the battery loss, in my case, was because I started loading it with apps. I treated it like my Pebble which let me load apps without any battery consequences. However, this watch is more sensitive and must be treated differently. Over the next week I'll ad some Android Wear apps to see if I can find the culprit. If I do I'll report back. It looks like, at least after today, that I'll end up keeping the watch.
That's when it occurred to me. There must be something going on between the watch and phone. That something was either a lot of bluetooth activity or an app keeping a conversation going or both. So, I decided to take a radical approach. On Sunday afternoon I did a factory reset of the Moto 360 and a factory reset of the Note 3. A radical approach, to be sure, but I was formally trained in the Scientific Method and needed to freeze all the variables to a known state. I would install only Android Wear and Motorola Connect. No other outside apps. I did install other apps on the phone but no more related to the phone.
So, here is my result, one day into this radical experiment. I took the watch off the charger at 5:30 am. The phone went off it's charger at 6:00am. It's now 6:30pm, 13 hours after I first picked up the watch. My day was normal with the same amount of notifications as the past week. The result? The Moto 360's battery indicates that it's at 49%. I have full confidence that it will make it until it goes back on the charger at 10pm.
My conclusion is that the battery loss, in my case, was because I started loading it with apps. I treated it like my Pebble which let me load apps without any battery consequences. However, this watch is more sensitive and must be treated differently. Over the next week I'll ad some Android Wear apps to see if I can find the culprit. If I do I'll report back. It looks like, at least after today, that I'll end up keeping the watch.