Got a new Galaxy Watch? These old battery life tricks still work

Anyone who bought the new Galaxy Watch Ultra may have noticed Samsung advertising the wearable's battery life on the e-shop. The company claims the Watch Ultra can last up to 100 hours in Power Saving Mode. It sounds nice, especially since it's such a round number. But realistically, would you want to limit your smartwatch to that extent to achieve a few days' worth of battery life? We don't think so.

We believe Power Saving Mode can come in handy only in extreme situations. However, it's not a realistic solution if you want to use a Galaxy Watch for its intended purpose: To track health, sleep, and fitness activities.

In our experience, we found two options you can manage on your smartwatch for the highest battery gains without compromising the user experience. Better yet, we can confirm that those same old tricks still yield the best results for new smartwatches, like the Galaxy Watch Ultra and Galaxy Watch 7.

Manage location and Always-On Display

Fiddling with smartwatch settings to increase battery life can feel frustrating, so last year, we set out to find which smartwatch settings have the greatest impact on battery life and which are worth being left alone (and always turned ON).

We found that the two options that have the greatest impact and are worth managing manually are location (GPS) and Always-On Display.

For the best balance between battery life and features, firstly, we recommend turning location ON only if you need Map navigation on the smartwatch or want to track specific exercise types or routes. Otherwise, it's important to keep location tracking OFF. This will save you a lot of battery life throughout the day.

Secondly, manage the Always-On Display (AOD) option as best as you can. Although it is tempting to keep AOD turned ON all the time, this feature really has a great impact on battery life. It might not be true for smartphones with beefy batteries, but smartwatches don't have a lot of mAh to work with, and the difference between keeping AOD OFF and ON can be huge.

As such, we can't stress enough that keeping AOD OFF when you don't need it will have a massive positive impact on the Galaxy Watch Ultra's battery life. Try to keep this feature OFF when you're at home and only turn it ON if you're going out and don't want to look like you're wearing a dead smartwatch on your wrist.

Thankfully, you can turn location and AOD ON or OFF from the quick toggle area on your Galaxy Watch Ultra, which you can access by swiping down. So, it's almost a hassle-free experience to manage these features, as you don't have to dig too deep into the Settings app to do it.

If you manage location and AOD options with moderate care, you will never have to turn off fitness and health tracking features or resort to extreme measures such as Power Saving Mode to gain comfortable battery autonomy. Try it out on your new Galaxy Watch Ultra or Watch 7, and you will see.