Who Has The Best Battery? Google, Samsung, And Apple's Smartwatch Showdown
If you are a fan of smartwatches, you know that they bring a lot of utility to your wrist and help you not to use your phone so much. Quick tasks like starting an app, summoning your assistant, and checking notifications are easier. Plus, you can load up your watch with complications to make information glanceable. But all that utility comes at a cost, namely in the battery life. Watches like the Withings Scanwatch and the Garmin Venu 3 can accomplish some of what other smartwatches can, but they also have the best battery life in the game. But they can't match the subjects of our test — the Apple Wath Series 9, the Samsung Watch 6, and the Pixel Watch 2 — when it comes to functionality.
We independently reviewed two of those three (and reviewed the Watch 6 Classic rather than the Watch 6), but we wanted to see how each would fare against each other in arguably the most important aspect of a smartwatch. Computing power and glanceable information is great, but if you can't get through a day or a weekend off the charger, maybe it's not so great.
Of course, if you're using an iPhone, you won't want to use a WearOS watch, and if you're using an Android phone, you can't use an Apple Watch. However, we still felt it was important to know where these watches stood with respect to each other.
How we tested
We had to balance some variables to put these watches through their paces. We set each watch up with five complications, though the complications varied from watch to watch. The complications were typically weather, battery, activity/steps, calendar, and day/date. There was some variation depending on the available options on a given watch.
For every charge cycle, we started the time when we took the watch off the charger and left the watch on until it reached less than 15%, which is usually when the watch warns you that it's getting low and usually offers to turn on some kind of low power mode. We never turned on low power mode, but in most cases, we let the battery run a bit further, often until it dropped below 10%.
After at least seven charge cycles, we averaged the amount of time it stayed running. For the record, both the Apple Watch Series 9 (45-millimeter) and the Pixel Watch 2 have a 306mAh battery, while the Samsung Watch 6 (44-millimeter) has a 425mAh battery.
Google vs Samsung vs Apple: The results
Considering the battery sizes, it should come as no surprise that the Samsung Watch 6 came out on top, but what is surprising is how close the margin was. While Samsung had an average uptime of 33 hours and 58 minutes, the Apple watch fell less than an hour short at 33 hours and five minutes. Considering the Apple Watch Series 9's battery is almost 30% smaller than the Samsung Watch 6, that's not nothing.
Frankly, it's embarrassing that the Pixel Watch 2 only managed four minutes over a full day (24 hours, four minutes), but it only comes in a single size — 41-millimeter. Here's hoping next year, Google will offer the watch in a larger size so it can better compete on the battery side.
Still, it's nice that two of our competitors can last almost a day and a half. Samsung should probably work harder to optimize battery life so that it can take advantage of that 28% bigger battery. But until then, it's fair to say that both operating systems are comparable in battery life, which is not a bad place to be.