Wesley's Tool-Box

With some of the smart watches or bands lasting a few days to a week, Apple Watch's claim of an 18-hour use for a typical day in case of the 38mm version was viewed as being too short and even the worries about the device not lasting a full day came about. Apple did claim that the 42mm version had a larger battery and would last somewhat longer. With all these in mind, I decided to log the daily battery status of my 42mm Apple Watch Sport for the past three weeks.

So how was it? First of all, Apple Watch doesn't say anything outright about its battery status unless it drops to 10%, at which it displays the warning you see above. (You could check the exact amount of battery left from one of the Glances whenever you want, by the way.) Personally, it was rare for me to even encounter this message at the end of a normal day, as you'll see later. So that alone tells you that the device is good enough for a full-day use. If you do get to see the warning, you could choose to enter the Power Reserve mode or ignore.

Power Reserve mode shuts down every function except the the time-telling ability like you see above so that it'll function as a watch as long as possible. When the battery does go near 0% (I think it happened around 2% remaining), it'll automatically enter this mode anyway. It's a last ditch effort to maintain its identity until you're able to charge it back to its normal life, so it'll be good if it could be avoided as much as possible.


This graph shows the result of the three-week use, which included all sorts of different usage patterns. Some involved heavy testing; some days I was traveling overseas; and some days I wasn't doing much but mostly sit around the office. All these were boiled down to these coloured bars - green bar represents the actual use time for the day, and the violet bar is the estimated time left until the battery runs out based on the remaining battery percentage noted on the far right.

On average, I got 22 hours and 12 minutes of use per day, with 6 hours and 17 minutes of use left, or about 22%. At no time did the combined time dip below 18 hours. These all clearly indicate that the 42mm version can last one full day of use. And if you forgot to recharge before going into sleep, you still have a good chance that it'll at least last the morning until you can get a two-hour charging session then.

What's also clear is that it will not realistically last full two days unless you use it really sparingly, so you need to get used to a daily recharging routine. Personally, I try to recharge about two hours before bedtime and get into sleep with a fully charged watch. I'm fine with this, but for those wanting to minimize the gap as much as possible, it might be disappointing.

I've been doing a comparison test of battery life between iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 5S for a few days. While that was happening, a bit of brouhaha over how iPhone 6 and 6 Plus supposedly bends in your pocket had been circulating the internet. It turned out that the whole thing was overblown as I suspected, and I already pointed out that it was okay to put it in the front pockets in general even before this so-called "bendgate / bendghazi" rolled in.

In any case, my belt cases work quite well. I try to use both phones identically when doing battery life comparison, so I have to have them carried around as close to me as possible. So I had my iPhone 5S strapped to my left side, while the 6 Plus took up my right side as you can see here. No worries about bending, and easy to get it out quickly, too. In normal times, I simply have one less iPhone on my waist.


As for the charging comparison side of things, Apple decided to save a bit of money on the charger. Although iPhone 6 Plus has nearly twice the battery charge as the previous models, it still ships with the same 5W charger. This is similar to how iPad mini ships with a 5W one instead of a 10W or 12W one like the "normal" iPads.

It's disappointing that Apple opted to do this, but maybe it isn't all that bad. The only way to find out is through testing. In order to see how much of an impact a lower-powered charger would cause, I prepared both 5W and 10W Apple-branded chargers for the tests.

Even with excellent performance, lackluster battery life will tarnish the usability of a phone. It's thus natural to see if iPhone 5S has made any improvements with battery usage from the previous generation. Apple has targeted it to be at least as good as iPhone 5, so I wanted to see how the two really compares in real life use.

The official capacities are 5.45Wh (3.8V 1440mAh) for iPhone 5 and 5.92Wh (3.8V 1560mAh) for iPhone 5S, an 8.6% difference. So 5S could use a little more power and still stay even. The iPhone 5 I have has seen use for about two months, while iPhone 5S has been with me for a month. So both have relatively fresh batteries close to these original capacities.

With these in mind and full charge, I started using the two devices, which were running iOS 7.0.3 now, in the same manner throughout the day. This meant opening the same app and taking the same actions at the same time. It's an interesting experience, and because apparent responsiveness of the two devices are similar at casual use, it wasn't too difficult to carry out.

To even the playfield further, push notifications, push data and automatic app updates were disabled, while screen brightness was fixed to 33%, which is good for indoor use. WiFi and Bluetooth were both enabled, but not used, so LTE was responsible for data. Other settings like GPS and visual effects were kept on by default. So how did the draining of the battery turn out?