Gear S3 Frontier battery drain on Tizen 3.0.0.2

[cephalon]

Hi

I have recently updated my Gear S3 Frontier to Tizen 3.0.0.2
On Tizen 3.0.0.1, I had a battery life of approx 3 days - after updating to Tizen 3.0.0.2, I have a battery life of max 1,5 day.
1. Do other users experience the same?
2. Does anyone have an idea of what could suddenly drain my battery so quickly?

[RayJay]

Hi All. Same here since update to 3.0.0.2. Contacted Samsung and was advised to return watch for an assessment.

Basically did same as others posting, replaced battery and motherboard, however I did notice that the Firmware installed had been rolled back to 3.0.0.1 and now working much better. Agreed, it is definitely an issue with the 3.0.0.2 update.

Advise that if getting Samsung to service or assess, get them to roll back Firmware to 3.0.0.1 as you can't do it yourself.

Funilly, after I got my watch back, immediately informed that update 3.0.0.2 was available. Quicky disabled update notifications!!! No way!

[Raymondchiz]

My watch had 3 day service on one charge . I did the update battery life went to 5 hours . I have not added any watch faces or any apps at all . Why the change in battery life ? 

[TechGuy18]

I have a gear s3 frontier that has been having the battery drain issue that started after the Tizen 3.0.0.2 update. Mine also never charged to 100% and when it did, it dropped immediately to 97% when pulled from the charger.  When it did charge overnight, the full charge was only lasted about 3 hours. Additionally, the watch was shutting down about an hour after coming off the charger and would have to go back on the charger in order to reboot.

The latest update a few weeks back induced a new problem. The watch started shutting down nearly immediately after being turned on and would only stay on when cradled.

I've tried one last experiment that may have temporarily saved this watch from the scrap pile. I've replaced the battery. There are a several Youtube videos that show you how. The battery was less tan $30 and the Y00 special screwdriver was about $8.  This is day 1 after the replacement. Its not shutdown once and i've only used 11 percent over 5 hours. This used to drain to zero in 3 hours.  It's looking very positive so far. I've added some watch faces but turned off things like heart rate monitoring and turned the screen brightness down to 4.

Samsung wants several hundred dollars to do what I did for about $35 and few minutes watching youtube. Check out the videos to see if this is something you can do.

[arachnida]

Same problem connected to iPhone. I uninstalled the Health app as it seemed to consume the most of the battery capacity.

[arachnida]

Poll: It looks like the latest available FW is responsible for the battery drain, but how many of you had a problem with the previous FW overheating the battery/watch? Mine became VERY hot, so hot it stopped working during recharging. I used the original stand and charger. Maybe our batteries are defective because of this overheating issue?

[TechGuy18]

THis is an update from my previous post on replacing the battery. The charge lasted just over 3 days. I installed a couple of watch faces and used it to track streps. Nothing heavy. It turns out that I used the NFC reader on day 1 in the morning and it was on for nearly 3 days. This normally drained the battery very quickly.  My charge for this second cycle seems to be holding very well.

My watch never got overly hot during the recharge cycles. It just stopped holding a charge after the software patch.

[Echobot]

I have the same issue.  I bought the watch three days ago and love it, but I can't get more than 20 hours out of a charge with most settings set to minimum load.  That's a far cry from what Samsung advertised.  I expected 2 to 3 days out of a charge, not less than 1.

So now I have to decide whether to return the watch to JB HiFi and give up on it, or wait for Samsung to fix the issue.

The only problem is that I had a Samsung Galaxy S5 and had to wait years for them to fix a software bug which all other Android vendors fixed within the first six months of the problem surfacing.  Based upon this experience, I'm dubious that Samsung will fix the S3 power drain issue any time soon and I'm leaning to returning the watch.

Pity.. because I love it.  Shame that Samsung aren't responding to this problem and giving customers some confidence that they will address the issue.

😞

[decoo]

Install plugin 2.2.03.18101561 from mirror site and problem is solved. Back to 2-3 days of battery life.  https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/samsung-electronics-co-ltd/gear-s-plugin/gear-s-plugin-2-2-03-18101561...

[arachnida]

@Decoo: This doesn't solve my problem, I use an iPhone so I can't install the update. BTW, there is already a newer version of this plugin available (26 dec 18).

Problem is that Samsung Belgium doesn't give a sh*t about it's customers. While landing on the Canadian Samsung webpage I started a chat with their help desk. They answered in 10 minutes, but couldn't help me because of guarantee rules as I bought the watch in Belgium. Belgium even doesn't have chat support, only phone (press 1, press5, press7 sorry we are busy, thank you for calling our expensive line beeeeep....) or messenger. I asked a question on messenger a day ago, still no answer.

[Zalonis]

Thanks