Galaxy Fit 3 - Battery Draining far faster than advertised

[Members_M9Nfc9r]

Having been a very happy Galaxy Fit 2 user, I bought the Galaxy Fit 3 the first moment it was available.

The device is advertised as getting 13 days of use on a single charge, but I have not found this to be the case AT ALL.

At most I get about 6 days charge, when with the Galaxy Fit 2 I often would get more than 2 weeks before I needed to recharge it.

Not being anxious about battery level is the main reason I picked these devices.

• I do not use Always on display.
• I have screen timeout set to 4 seconds (lowest level).
• I do use raise wrist to wake. 
• I do not use stress measurement.
• I've turned off a lot of notifications so I'm only getting the essentials like IM, calls, SMS, etc - so it's not vibrating a crazy amount.
• I also have been on an exercise break, so I haven't even been tracking workouts.
• Send diagnostic data to Samsung is on (perhaps I should turn this off?)

But the interesting thing is that I've been watching it closely and it seems that during the day it generally performs very well with minimal battery usage. However at night, I put it into sleep mode and it often drops 10% or more overnight - despite the fact that the screen is off the entire time.

I immediately assumed this was due to the sleep tracking features (blood oxygen, snore detection), but I turned all of them off. I then thought perhaps it's the heart rate every 10 minutes, so I switched that to manual only yesterday morning and fully charged the device. By yesterday evening when I went to put it into sleep mode it was still at 100%. I woke up a few times during the night, and as is often the case I noticed that the green light at the back of the watch was flashing a lot and for what seemed like a very long time. Considering I had disabled regular heart rate monitoring I don't even know why this was coming on at all. Some points I would read for a few minutes and see the green light emanating from my wrist continuously.

Anyway - I woke up in the morning after about 8 hours sleep and turned off sleep mode. The watch was at 87% - a drop of 13% overnight. That is basically the opposite of what I used to see with my Galaxy Fit 2, which usually, with the screen off overnight, would rarely drop anything overnight.

Anyway, I'll continue to see what happens with it now that I've disabled heart rate checks every 10 minutes - but I must feel like something is wrong and either the hardware or software has a bug that needs to be fixed.

Software Version: R390XXU0AWLL - I've checked for update and found none.

I'm almost tempted to go back to my Galaxy Fit 2 which even after multiple years is still regularly lasting for two weeks without charging.

[nilkug]

Same situation here. I have reset my band from the Wearable app just to see if that changes anything and reviewed the settings. Before reset it was lasting about 5-6 days. Hopefully an update will address this in the near future..

[Members_M9Nfc9r]

I am somewhat relieved to hear I'm not the only one. 

I did restart my watch after disabling the 10-min heart rate checks, and the first two nights it seemed to be better, but last night the watch was in sleep mode for exactly 8 hours and lost 10% of its battery.

I'm tempted to try not using sleep mode tonight and just turning off the screen completely for the night and see how it goes. Perhaps sleep tracking is causing excessive battery drain? I can't actually see a way to disable sleep tracking in Samsung Health or Wear apps - I can only find the option to disable "Blood oxygen during sleep" and "Snore detection" (and I've already disabled both of those).

Is this community the best way to get feedback to Samsung that there is a problem?

[KholaI]

Hey @Members_M9Nfc9r 

If you're experiencing an issue with your Galaxy Fit 3, I would advise sending in an error report so that our engineers can look into this further to see if there is an issue with the software and/or hardware:

https://www.samsung.com/uk/support/mobile-devices/how-do-i-send-an-error-report/

[Members_M9Nfc9r]

Thanks Kholal. I have submitted an error report as advised.  Perhaps @nilkug can do the same!

[Members_M9Nfc9r]

The last few nights I've been testing not using "Sleep Mode" on the watch. Instead, before I go to bed, I turn on Do Not Disturb, and in the display settings I disable "Raise Wrist to Wake" and "Touch Screen to Wake". This keeps the screen off completely overnight.

I've found it keeps battery much better as a result overnight. I've recorded 3%, 1%, and 4% drops over the past three night's sleep. Which is much much better than the 10-13% overnight drops I was seeing with Sleep Mode enabled.

[Members_24m4vob]

I was having the same issues. With mostly default settings (e.g. Raise wrist to wake enabled, blood oxygen disabled etc), I could reach 6 days maximum (~4 with blood oxygen). I had noticed that the "Raise wrist to wake" feature is too sensitive/inaccurate, which causes the screen to wake up all day long. Setting the screen turn-off timer to 4s (from 7s) did not improve the situation. As a test, I turned off "Raise Wrist to Wake" and enabled "Touch screen to wake" instead. The difference is impressive. It has been 9 days since the last charge and the band is at 42% (same usage). I also enable "Sleep mode" during sleep and obviously disable it in the morning, but I doubt that matters, battery-wise. To me, it looks like the problem stems mainly from a fairly inefficient "Raise wrist to wake" implementation.

[Members_M9Nfc9r]

Interesting - I have really found Sleep Mode to be a huge problem, consistently losing 10-13% overnight. When I don't use Sleep Mode and just turn off the screen completely it is fine.

With Raise Wrist to Wake I haven't noticed so many issues (although I do spend a lot of my day typing at a computer, so there is a bit less motion in general).

My day-time battery usage the last few days has been steady between 6-8% drain. I also sometimes find that the day after I charge the watch to 100% it stays at 100% all day long (perhaps they marked the 100% point smaller than the actual battery capacity so it appears to retain battery life for longer?).

[Members_24m4vob]

I suspect your battery gain comes from turning off the screen because, as far as I can tell, Sleep Mode is a shortcut for enabling multiple relevant options at once (disable always on display, disable raise wrist to wake, enable do not disturb, lowest brightness, galaxy phone sleep routine/mode settings etc).

In my case, I just charged the band again, almost two weeks since the last time (13.5 days). Each day (24h) it would lose around 7%. The only relevant change is the disabling of "Raise wrist to wake". So, at least from my experience, "Raise wrist to wake" appears to be very inefficient and in need of improvements.

[Members_M9Nfc9r]

But that's the thing - is that Sleep Mode hasn't worked as expected at all for me. I got a weird reply from Samsung tech support saying that from their analysis of the system log "data messages were visible which frequently woke up the system. This may be due to accidental touching of the screen during sleep". But surely in sleep mode touching the screen should be irrelevant. 

Anyway, now that I've stopped using Sleep Mode the battery life is substantially better. I'm also generally seeing 6-9% loss during the day depending on my activities and 1-3% loss overnight, which should see me getting nearly 2 weeks without needing to charge.

I'll re-test Sleep Mode again soon.