Smartwatches are packed with so many helpful features that allow you to access convenient, on-the-go notifications, fitness tracking essentials and your favorite apps. But these can quickly drain your battery — not ideal when you're training or away from home.
Fortunately, there are ways to boost the juice you get on many of the best smartwatches so you can record your workout, monitor your sleep, or meddle through a busy day without worrying your watch is about to prematurely shut down.
To help you out, we've rounded up the seven simple but effective strategies you need to to maximize your smartwatch’s battery life right now. The steps will vary depending on your device and operating system, but here's where to start to keep powered up for longer.
1. Check battery usage
The first place to start is your watch's settings app. Most smartwatches have a battery management setting that'll show you what is draining the most battery on your device. Often, you'll get an indication about whether the app was active in the background or not.
The feature should be found in Settings and will offer a summary of how much energy the apps and features use up. Armed with this information, you can decide on how you manage these features and apps on your smartwatch to get the performance you need.
2. Reduce notifications
If you’ve got all notifications turned on in your smartwatch and you receive a high volume daily, this will cause the screen display to light up and vibrate frequently and, as a result, drain the battery.
A good way to lengthen your smartwatch's battery life is to tailor which apps you allow to send notifications to your watch. Maybe you’d only like texts from your main messaging platform to appear on your watch or certain social networks.
And perhaps you just want to see workout and fitness reminders and would rather not see work emails come through while you are out for a run or training in the gym. If you choose to limit certain notifications, this should make a difference to your watch’s battery life.
3. Use power-saving modes
Just as your phone has a low-power mode to extend the battery, many smartwatches have a similar feature. This typically reduces background activity, dims the screen brightness, and limits the watch to only show essential features like the time and basic fitness stats such as your step count.
Plus, there are other settings you can toggle that will help to extend your battery life, such as Airplane mode, Do Not Disturb mode and Bedtime Mode. Airplane mode disables all wireless connectivity (this includes Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS) on your smartwatch until you turn this setting back off.
Meanwhile, Do Not Disturb and Bedtime mode mute notifications and dim the display to prevent distractions from disturbing your sleep or focus time. If you're an Apple wearer, you can also activate the Apple Watch's low power mode to conserve battery.
4. Turn off voice commands
While some people love the convenience of speaking to Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa for fast answers on their wrists, it's a potential battery drainer that you may be able to do without in a pinch.
This is especially true if you have any always-listen features turned on, as the watch will be continually processing background noises and speech to locate any activation keywords or requests. So if you need to preserve battery, it's wise to turn this off.
You will be able to disable voice activation in the settings menu of your smartwatch and prevent this feature from running in the background and draining your battery.
5. Reduce sounds and vibrations
Every time your watch vibrates or plays a sound — whether to remind you to move or alert you to an incoming call — it consumes battery. So, disabling haptics and switching your smartwatch to silent mode can help it last longer between charges.
This is also a useful alternative if you still want visual notifications on your watch but need to reduce power usage. In that case, you can toggle the volume and vibration intensity and this should keep your watch battery life going a little longer.
6. Uninstall apps
Smartwatches and many of the best fitness trackers have installable apps you can download to your wrist-worn device to increase its utility. It can be incredibly useful to have these on your watch, but if there are apps you no longer use, it's worth uninstalling them.
Many of these apps run in the background and consume battery life as they sync data, send notifications, and action updates. Next time you give your tracker a deep clean, consider giving it a digital clean up to remove unnecessary apps, boost battery life, and free up storage space.
7. Get an extra charging source
Whether it’s an extra charging cable or one of the best power banks that your smartwatch charger is compatible with, having an additional charging option can be a game-changer, especially if you are out all day and forget to charge your watch overnight or while traveling.
More from Tom's Guide
- 15 tips to improve your Apple Watch’s battery life
- Smartwatches vs. fitness trackers — how to choose which is right for you
- Best sports watches for outdoor workouts 2024
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