From earlier in the week, soon after the reset:-
“A workday. Watch on at 6.00am, battery 100%. Working day, a couple of text messages, a few emails and notifications, controlling podcast playback with ’now playing’. It’s 8.10pm - 14 hours of light use - and I’m at 6% battery. What the heck is going on here? People are tweeting that they’re ending the day with 75% remaining; just turning my watch on and leaving it, the battery drain is about 5% / hour...”
A few days on now and tbh I’m still none the wiser as to why my battery drains faster than other people’s seem to; I did have a revelation though, and checked my actual usage (iPhone companion app > general > usage) and on the days when I thought I hadn’t used it much, it turns out the actual usage was around 4 1/2 hours - or bang on what Apple says you can expect from a charge for continuous use. So yeah, I'd be interested to hear what the actual usage is from these guys who are claiming 75% remaining at the end of the day.
So instead of trying to figure out what’s ’wrong’, I’ve simply been making some adjustments. Want to know how to increase your battery life by a couple of hours a day? Don’t put your watch on 6.00am when you get up, put it on at 8.00am when you leave the house. Simple huh? And effective. Need to extend the battery well into the evening? I put it on charge for the 15 minutes it takes me to have a shower and change when I get home from work, and there’s another hour or so of battery added.
This also means that I get to wear some of my older watches in the mornings, something I used to do pre-Apple Watch; it wasn't unusual for me to wear three watches during any given day - one to breakfast, another during the working day, and a third in the evening, so it really is a treat to have some of my ’old friends’ back. But damn, are they heavy! Fantastic though, that at any time, at any angle and without moving my arm at all I can glance at my watch and see the time. Seriously, I cannot describe what a simple pleasure this is. Apple really needs to have this 'ambient' feature added as soon as they can; they can make it dim, they can lose the complications, the animated sweep second-hand, just give me a watch face that’s always on, telling me the time.
While I was trying to track down the battery issue I uninstalled all of the watch apps, and interestingly I haven’t felt remotely compelled to reinstall any of them.
It's been a hot, sticky and dirty week of work this week - lots of fine dust and debris all over my hands and wrists, yes, even wearing latex gloves - and I've had a lot of disconnections from my phone, which is disappointing; if I'm up a ladder, I’m not going to be dicking around tapping my passcode into my watch, and wearing latex gloves, while the touch screen is still accessible, there’s obviously no TouchID to unlock the watch. Not a great situation, and I’d appreciate some way to vary the length of time the watch can be out of contact from your skin before it locks itself; I appreciate that there are security concerns here, but having the option to up the lack of contact from 1 second to 3 seconds would help me a great deal, I'm sure.
It was Apple’s developer conference this week, and they announced that Apple Pay was coming to the Uk in July. Finally... It looks like it will be restricted to a maximum purchase of £20 though, just like all contact less payments are here in the UK, despite the apple watch being far more secure (direct skin contact to a person who has unlocked the device with a fingerprint) but early days, so let’s see how it works out.
But overall, I'm happy enough with it, and looking forward to watchOS 2 later in the year, which promises a bit more autonomy for the Apple Watch.
