What’s the best smartwatch for battery life?

AAllow GaGu the indulgence of laying a textual wreath for the now-deceased Pebble, a properly smart watch line which typically lasted a good few days before sputtering out. It may not have had the flash of the Apple Watch or the skills of Android Wear slash Samsung Gear, but darn: those things had staying power.

Although new owner (and killer) Fitbit is yet to properly exploit the E-ink tech and customisable interface that gave the Pebble its popularity, something along those lines could be a good option if you’re averse to charging regularly. The dinky Fitbit Alta HR ($199), for example, can muster around seven days on a charge, but its smartness is limited to basic notification alerts and the standard suite of fitnessmonitoring metrics.

So let us look at the definitelysmart end of the line. Guru is yet to wrap Series 4 of the Apple Watch (from $599) around his hairy sausage wrists, but our review says ABOVE It’s just our luck to run out of battery when we need it the most it beats its stated battery life by a long way – it can go three or four days easily. This is done mostly through cheating, switching the screen off unless you very deliberately turn your wrist, but GaGu loves a dodge so he offers a pass on this one.

Android-wise, GaGu can’t stop eyeing up the TicWatch Pro (around $330), which uses two displays. There’s an OLED for all the fancy business, and a more standard LCD on top which does the job of telling time, giving it a good 48 hours of staying power – and using ‘essential mode’ could stretch that up to 30 days.

Guru has yet to wrap the Series 4 Apple Watch around his hairy sausage wrists, but our review says it beats its stated 18-hours