Samsung has just launched its latest Galaxy Watch, and so far we’ve been pretty impressed with it in our hands-on Galaxy Watch 7 review. But not everyone has been blown away, and it all comes down to one thing: battery life.
Complaints have arisen from users on social media that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7’s battery is draining rather more quickly than people would like. On X (formerly Twitter), @Nole_fan_girl noted that after just over 10 hours of use, their smartwatch had just 10% battery life remaining, with them commenting that they “can’t get a full day use” out of it. Similarly, @JeffTechnically said that “Personally I’m lucky to get 16 hours on my 44mm Watch 7.”
They’re far from the only people to complain on forums, and it seems like Samsung has taken notice. Writing on Samsung’s South Korean forums, a company representative said that Samsung was aware of the issue. According to a machine translated version of the page, the rep explained that “we have identified the cause and prepared a solution,” adding that they hope to distribute the patch soon.
The representative claimed that the issue was software-related rather than being due to faulty hardware. That is encouraging, as a software glitch can usually be fixed with an update, and it would be much harder to address the problem if hardware was at its root.
A big step back
Despite the Samsung official’s assertion that software was to blame – and that Samsung has discovered the cause of the issue – we still don’t know exactly what is going on and what has caused the cases of excessive battery drain.
Still, poor battery performance such as this is well out of the ordinary. The Samsung Galaxy Watch 6, for example, got around 25 hours from a full charge in our testing. For some users to only be getting 10 to 11 hours out of the Galaxy Watch 7, then, is a big step back.
We’ll have to see how Samsung addresses the problem, whether it reveals exactly what caused the issue, and how long it takes to get things fixed up. Hopefully we won’t be waiting too long, or there are going to be some very disappointed smartwatch users out there.