How I made my Apple Watch battery last 3 days....

I've been doing an experiment over the last few days to see just how long I could get the Apple Watch battery to last - as it turns out, 3 days is the answer..!

However, there's a bit of cheating going on here, because only during the evening of each day did I allow the Watch anywhere near the iPhone which it is paired to - which obviously limits the functionality hugely. In addition, I was only actually wearing the Watch during the evenings!

Now you would be forgiven for wondering what the point of this was, and really it was to try and understand how impactful the connectivity is, that the iPhone has with the Watch - and turns out it's reasonably significant. Whilst Low-power Bluetooth is being used here, every time there is a communication, involving some data transfer (and potentially the screen being lit also), it's taking chunks out of the size-optimised  battery.

Most people are finding it possible to get to the end of one day with something left in the battery when using the Watch in normal setup. But I've found that I can get two days - how so?

The answer lies in managing the amount of comms the watch has with the phone, and also how much you use it. Let's take them in reverse order:

- if you use the watch constantly, particularly with Apps that need the phone, then you'll drain the battery faster - for tasks that require more than 30 secs of interaction, you are probably better off on your phone anyway

- if you have EVERYTHING turned on in the watch (all possible Apps installed, with all notifications on), then the watch will invariably use more power - but why have everything on? Decide what you need, and you'll find its probably less than everything - personally I have only messages, activity, and a few other apps pushing notifications to the phone

With this approach I get two days of runtime, every time.

The big question out there, is how much tuning and optimisation Apple's Engineering experts can do to eke out some extra hours from the battery, in successive OS updates. I know I'll be looking at the release of Watch OS2 keenly, to see if it's possible to squeeze even more runtime out of the watch - getting to three days with 'normal' usage would be excellent!