Pebble Time with Michael – Day 18
Pebble Time battery life is always an interesting topic to discuss. Pebble itself claims “up to” 7 days battery life for the watch. I’ve read claims on the Internet of up to 12 days battery life for a Pebble Time. Yet after 18 days of usage of my Pebble Time I’ve never achieved more than 5 days, with just 4 days being the norm for me.
Now I don’t run my watch completely dry, usually charging it when I get to, or am about to get to, the 20% battery remaining warning screen. The one time I got 5 days usage out of my watch was when I ran it well past that warning screen, right down to less than 10% battery charge remaining.
In my Day 6 article here on pebblestuff, What’s the Real Battery Life of a Pebble Time?, I discussed my initial impressions of the Pebble Time’s battery life, as well as an app for displaying its current status. Twelve more days of usage have just confirmed those views, but they have also led me to a new program for reporting on battery status: Battery+.
Battery+ is a far more sophisticated application than the Battery Lifetime app reviewed back on Day 6, but like most things in the world it has its advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage this program offers is much more detailed information and a wealth of statistics on battery performance since the watch was last charged. Battery+ will even put an entry in your timeline suggesting when you should next charge the battery. It can gather and provide all this detailed information because it constantly runs in background using the Pebble Time’s Activity Tracker.
Therein lies the disadvantage of the Battery+ – it utilizes the Activity Tracker to constantly run and continuously monitor changes in battery status. The current Pebble OS architecture allows only a single application at a time to utilize the Activity Tracker function. If you are running Battery+, you really can’t effectively use any other application that requires the Activity Tracker functionality.
There are a variety of very handy applications that require this function to operate correctly – mainly fitness oriented applications. These include FitCat (reviewed by me in Let Pebble Time Count Your Steps – With FitCat), Morpheuz, Misfit, UP for Pebble, and others. All of these require exclusive use of the Activity Tracker function to operate correctly and you can really only utilize one of these at a time. So if you decide to run Battery+ on your Pebble Time you will have to forgo using some of the most sophisticated fitness apps currently available in order to do so.
I had to stop using FitCat in order to run Battery+ and give up counting my total daily steps on my Pebble Time. Nevertheless, I’m finding the information provided by Battery+ to be useful enough to make up for this limitation, and will continue to use this app on my Pebble Time until and unless I discover some other application even more valuable to me that also requires Activity Tracker.