Have you noticed any battery life issues with your Samsung Galaxy Watch 7?

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority

Power remains the single biggest issue impacting the usefulness of smartwatches. With currently available technology, there’s just no great way to give them the functionality and performance we demand, keep size and weight down to a reasonable figure, and get anywhere near the kind of battery life we’re used to from traditional watches. That said, every new generation tries to strike that balance just a little better than smartwatches before, and thanks to efficient new processors and software optimizations, sometimes we really do get to see meaningful gains.

Then there’s the problem of when to charge these things. They want to monitor our sleep. They want to monitor our workouts. They even want to monitor when we’re just sitting at our desk (if only to tell us we need to get up and start moving). When are you supposed to find time to take your watch off to charge?

Right now, we’re thinking about all this in the context of Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch 7 Ultra. Introduced earlier this month and now available for sale, the wearables run the new 3nm Exynos W1000 chip — what Samsung calls its “most powerful Watch processor ever.” While the Ultra has a 590mAh battery to fuel that powerful chip, the 44mm Watch 7 only has a 425mAh battery to work with — and the 40mm size is stuck with just 300mAh. Is that enough to cut it? Based on a number of user reports we’ve pulled up online, we’re starting to wonder if it might not be.

Over on Reddit, new Galaxy Watch 7 owner EarphoneJacknCoke reports barely getting 12 hours of operation from the 40mm model, even with GPS, Wi-Fi, and all the obvious screen-related power drains disabled. AveragePichu also has the 40mm Watch 7, and struggles to get a full day’s usage (about 16 hours) out of a charge. We don’t know which size they’re using, but randompartner and Difficult_Reason_621 similarly get nervous when they’re barely finishing the day with any charge left. And Kolyei is doing a little better, pushing up to a day and a half, but still feels like the Watch 7 is falling short of its potential.

Have any of you gotten your hands on a new Galaxy Watch 7 yet? What are you first impressions? And critically — how’s your experience with battery life? We’re still making observations with our own review model, but on the chance that users might be having very different experiences with the hardware, we’d like to gather as wide a data set as possible.