Both my wife and I have apple watches. The battery life is bad enough that you have to either charge it at night (and miss out on the sleep tracking features) or charge it during the day for an hour (and remember to go get it once it's charged).
I know the newer near a thousand dollar models can get better battery life but my 2 year old version and her 5 year old version do not last much past 24 hours.
Other watchmakers have made very different design tradeoffs to produce better battery life. A base mode Garmin will happily run for over a week. The fancy models over a month. They still have great tracking and notification features. Might be worth a look when your current hardware no longer meets your needs.
Explicitly trying not to pile on the “let me tell you how to manage your notifications” train by the way! That’s up to you and yours. Just nerding out on smartwatches.
Agree. I have a Garmin and I charge it most days for 10-15min when I'm showering (most because every now and then I take it to the shower for a wash). It's usually between 80 and 90% charged this way.
One caveat is that notifications are quite basic and there's no way to respond to them - it's push only. They also always get sent to the watch straight away even if they're set to notify once a day (this is probably an iPhone limitation - no idea how it works on Android).
I know the newer near a thousand dollar models can get better battery life but my 2 year old version and her 5 year old version do not last much past 24 hours.