I have a $120 fitness/smart watch. It isn't the best, it isn't the worst. I have been very happy with it up to this point and feel as though it communicates well with GPS as well as syncs with my phone extremely well. Up until now I have also been very happy with the battery life of it but I found out in the middle of a race that I was very interested in tracking all of, that the battery life on this cheaper watch is not all that great when you are actually exercising.
It died about 10km in to the race and a lot of this was my own ignorance so I am posting this so that those of you out there with similar watches that might be considered low end, do not end up with the same problem.
I have the Xiaomi Watch 2 and as far as I know this is widely available basically everywhere because the Chinese are pretty good at distribution. I knew it was not a high end watch when I bought it but after all the trouble I went through with my Garmin and especially with Garmin absolutely refusing to help me with it because it was past warranty, I had determined that I was no longer going to be part of the high end exercise watch club.
This watch has been wonderful for me on tracking local runs, playing pickelball, swimming, and basically doing any sort of activity that I wanted to track. I did notice that the battery life was one of probably best to charge it every single day though, which is what I did on most days and rarely had it turn off on me, unlike my garmin whose battery was fucked and wouldn't hold a charge for more than an hour or so.
Anyway, and I should have seen this coming, the watch has basically everything activated by default when you get it out of the box. Because I was enjoying the fact that everything seemlessly worked, I didn't mess with this. I also rarely exercised for several hours in a row so it wasn't much of an issue.
However, when I was in the race over this past weekend I started getting low battery notifications as soon as 7km in. I had my phone with me, which we were allowed to do as long as we signed off on prize money that I was never going to get anyway, and realized that all the notifications were going to my watch as well. Every time this happened it would activate the screen.
Because I had basically sung my participation in this race to the masses from a nearby hillside, I was getting a ton of notifications while the race was taking place from friends of mine who had just woken up and wanted to wish me good luck or to "kill it man!"
Every single one of those notifications activated my screen for 10 seconds or so even if I didn't look at them, which I didn't for the most part. This, combined with the constant heart rate monitoring, the altitude monitoring, the GPS tracking, and the regular things that a watch has to do must have been too much for the tiny lithium battery to endure and about 10km in the thing shut off on me. That really was a bummer to me because I wanted my information after the fact, which it did save some of, but not all of.
Lesson learned I guess but I will put this out there to all of you that have this or other similar low to mid-range watches that there is a function where you can deactivate almost everything if you are participating in a race. It seems so obvious now and I feel like a food for not doing it.
From any screen simply swipe down and the picture of the battery, provided you didn't mess with the interface, will be bottom center. When you press it, it is going to inform you of some mumbo jumbo that the lawyers probably told them it has to say, but basically it shuts off almost all extra functions that your watch would normally perform. It can then focus on tracking your performance during a race or whatever else you are doing for long periods of time. It will not inform you about any alerts from any apps on your phone nor will it automatically turn on the watch face just because you raise your arm slightly. In fact, you can even set it so that you have to actually make contact with the screen using your other hand to have it turn on at all! Then it will remain on only for 10 seconds.
There have been various testimonials that I have read out there that by activating this feature the battery life can be extended to nearly 10 days without exercise tracking and 3 days with regular exercise tracking.
I suppose it is understandable that a watch that has to do a lot more stuff like communicate with satellites, tell you have fast you are moving, and also calculate your caloric burn based on your heart rate is going to be using a lot more battery than it normally would. combine this with the multi-tasking of telling you every time someone sends you a Whatsapp and that battery is going to go kaput pretty rapidly.
I wish I had known this before the race because I was so confident in the thing's abilities that I didn't even fully charge it before leaving my apartment that day.
Just activate the battery saver and you can, if you want, go into the setting and tweak them to some degree if you really want to. For me, just hitting that one button has been enough.
On other brands of watches I am sure they have something similar. I'm just a bit disappointed that this is the first organized race I have participated in since transitioning to nearly 100% cardio, I trained for it, and now I have no record of how I even did in it :(
lesson learned