Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Last week Samsung said that an update addressing Galaxy Watch 7 battery issues would arrive “soon.”
- The first update for the Watch 7 and Watch 7 Ultra started landing earlier this week.
- Samsung’s changelog makes multiple references to battery stability — but will this solve all problems?
The fact that smartwatches are at all practical is something of a small miracle — literally (well, the “small” part, anyway). Manufacturers squeeze the power of a smartphone into a package not much larger than a square inch. Problem is, this kind of form factor doesn’t have a ton of room for a big battery, so there are always going to be trade-offs in terms of endurance. We’ve come to expect limitations like that — within reason — but sometimes the sort of battery life we end up getting is just nothing short of disappointing. After following reports of some issues right along that line with the Galaxy Watch 7, we’re happy to see Samsung finally start getting a potential fix out to users.
Last week we asked you about your experiences using and charging the Watch 7, and whether or not you found your new wearable delivering the sort of battery life you expected. As we quickly learned, the majority of respondents were very much unhappy about Watch 7 battery life. And while sometimes problems like this are a matter of expectations getting too high, this time we saw a Samsung representative acknowledge the issue and offer that a software fix should be arriving “soon” to address it. Sure enough, new updates are out this week for the Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch 7 Ultra.
Over on Reddit, we spotted user OscarLimaAlpha share a screenshot of the notice accompanying their own Watch 7 update, where Samsung announces that both “battery stability” and “battery charging stability” have been improved.
Now, those aren’t too far off from the sort of “nothing” throwaway lines you might expect to see in pretty much any software update (just like the non-specific “stability improvements” also listed here), but in the wake of this specific issue and Samsung’s earlier comments, the pair of them here feel like a direct response.
Of course, it’s easy to say “your battery performance is getting more stable” — does this update actually deliver? There’s no substitute for hard data, so let’s get us some:
Is your Galaxy Watch 7 lasting longer after Samsung's new update?
0 votes
If you haven’t gotten any notice about an update yet, sit tight; it’s coming. In the meantime, just keep a charger for your Watch 7 nearby, we guess?
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