Do you own a Samsung Watch and have noticed that the battery is draining much quicker than expected? I too had this problem and spent hours scouring the web for answers. I tried various “solutions” including uninstalling apps, using a darker watchface and even resetting the watch entirely.
While this preserved a very small amount of battery life, it wasn’t the definitive cure I was looking for, so I decided to dig a little deeper. I found that you can break down the battery use for the watch by opening the Wearable app on your phone and proceeding to the section “About Watch” and then “Battery”.
If you are experiencing the battery-draining issue then you will notice that the Contacts App has most likely taken up to three quarters of the battery life. “But why?” I hear you ask. I asked myself this very question and this is where I had to put my thinking cap on and run some tests.
Here is what I found. The contacts app is of course used to store your contacts on your watch, allowing you to call or message them from the watch itself but if you have various groups of contacts then the watch will continuously attempt to sync those contacts, over and over again in and endless loop.
The fix for this is quite simple, and I will talk you through how to achieve it. You need to move all of your contacts into one group, whether that’s on your samsung account, sim card or other account on your phone, as long as they are all under the same one.
You need to head over to the Contacts App and then bring out the side menu (assuming you are on the latest version of android) and choose “Manage Contacts”. You should see a screen that looks similar to this:
You then need to select “Move Contacts” (but if you are feeling adventurous you can go to the “Merge Contacts” and tidy them up before you move them). Once you have come to the “Move Contacts” screen, it should look a little something like this:
I’ve hidden my email addresses for obvious reasons, but you’ll see a list of accounts. Take some time to pick an account as this will be where you are going to move all of your accounts to. Once you have chosen the account, all you need to do is start moving from the other accounts into that account. So from the top, I selected “Phone” and then for the “To” option I selected the 3rd account down in the list. Rinse and repeat until all of your contacts are under the one account.
Once you have successfully done this, restart your watch and enjoy the extended battery life you will now experience. My watch went from 6-10 hours life to now lasting a solid 2 days.
If this guide has helped you at all, please leave me a comment or drop me a tweet.