Zac Kew-Dennis / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite chip and a massive 800mAh battery (up 35% from 590mAh), but official estimates still quote the same “up to 60 hours with Always-On Screen” as the original Watch Ultra model.
- The Galaxy Watch 9 models have also increased battery sizes and switched from the Exynos W1000 to the Snapdragon Wear Elite, but Samsung continues to offer up to 40 hours of battery life without Always-On Display on both generations.
- The lack of runtime improvements despite Wear OS 7’s efficiency improvements and larger batteries could be due to power consumption, such as the brighter 5,000-nit display, lower processor efficiency, or simply outdated marketing features.
Samsung officially announced Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 At its latest Unpacked event, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite SoC features a large silicon pivot along with a large 800mAh battery cell. Interestingly, despite the larger battery and newer chip, Samsung’s official spec sheet claims the same “up to 60 hours with Always On” battery life as the original 590mAh Exynos W1000 Galaxy Watch Ultra.
The specific discrepancy was first highlighted by Phonefuturist XQuestioning whether the Snapdragon Wear Elite is better than the Exynos W1000, given that it removes the 35% battery capacity jump.
In Samsung and Qualcomm’s defense, there are a few other changes to the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 that could hurt that larger battery. The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 has a Super AMOLED display, up from 3,000 nits to 5,000 nits on the Galaxy Watch Ultra. However, note that this peak brightness applies to only a small portion of the screen for a small period of time. Not all display pixels will reach 5000 nits at the same time, and this peak will not last long on individual pixels.
The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 also has a slightly higher resolution of 498 x 498 pixels compared to the Watch Ultra’s 480 x 480, but it’s a small difference that doesn’t explain why such a large battery capacity difference doesn’t actually improve battery life.
Looking at the rest of the group, we see similar trends. The Galaxy Watch 8 has a battery capacity of 325 mAh and 435 mAh for the 40 mm and 44 mm sizes, respectively, while the Galaxy Watch 9 reached 390 mAh and 445 mAh respectively. The bump is small, but Samsung continues to advertise up to 40 hours of use without Always On Display on all four models. Samsung has made the same SoC leap here and seems to have wiped out all the gains of a bigger battery in this case as well.
There is a chance that Samsung will take the lazy route and not upgrade the battery life. Otherwise, it doesn’t inspire much confidence in the efficiency of the Snapdragon Wear Elite.
We’ve reached out to Samsung for more information on these numbers, and we’ll report back when we hear more from the company. Hopefully, the Snapdragon Wear Elite makes up for this apparent lack of efficiency with better performance and is worth the move away from the Exynos. We will find out in our review.
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