Poor battery life on the Galaxy Watch 7? Samsung is working on a fix

Summary

• Despite promising efficiency, early Galaxy Watch 7 owners report unexpected battery drain issues and poor battery life.
• Samsung confirms that a bug is causing battery drain on new watches.
• A software update to address the battery drain issue should roll out soon.

Samsung’s newest Wear OS watches, the Galaxy Watch 7 series, went up for sale earlier this month. Running Wear OS 5 and packing the company’s latest 3nm Exynos chip, both of which heavily focus on efficiency, you’d expect the wearables to last longer than other Android smartwatches. Since their launch, though, several Galaxy Watch 7 owners have complained about excessive battery drain and sub-par battery life. Turns out that it’s due to a bug that Samsung promised to fix soon.

Reddit and Samsung’s community forums are filled with complaints from early Galaxy Watch 7 and Ultra owners about poor battery life. Despite light to moderate usage, they report the wearable’s battery draining to almost zero within 12 hours.

With a 3nm Exynos W1000 under the hood, which the company claims brings notable performance and efficiency improvements, the complaints were unexpected and surprising. They were even more surprising coming from early Galaxy Watch Ultra buyers, as it houses a beefy 590mAh battery and should provide a claimed runtime of over 48 hours.

A Galaxy Watch product team member confirmed on Samsung’s Korean community forum that they found the bug causing excessive battery drain. A software update to address the issue might soon start rolling out.

Turn off “Hey, Google” and Bluetooth to reduce battery drain

Until Samsung rolls out a fix, turn off always-on “Hey, Google” detection on your Galaxy Watch to see if that helps improve battery life. Turning off this feature seems to have worked for several users, reducing the excessive battery drain. Some users also report that turning off Bluetooth worked for them.

Given the Galaxy Watch 7 and Ultra use Samsung’s new Exynos chipset and run a new version of Wear OS, some underlying bugs likely slipped through the company’s testing, leading to high battery usage.

There’s no word on when the firmware will be out, but it should not take long. The Galaxy Watch 7 lineup has not received any software updates since its release, so the first post-launch build may also contain other fixes and improvements. Once the new firmware is rolled out, Samsung’s newest smartwatches should provide multi-day battery life.