Yesterday I accidently left my cell phone at home. I have a #Samsung #Galaxy #S5 and have the #Samsung #Gear S attached to it (as reviewed previously). Yesterday was the first day that I had truely had to manage without my phone and rely solely on the #Gear.
0830
It didnt start well. The watch is meant to automatically send a message to the phone when out of bluetooth range and inform the phone to send through any calls to the watch cell number. It simply pings the Gear application to tell the phone to forward all calls. It failed to do this. Well, it sent the message but it never got a suitable reply from the phone to say it was allowing forwarding of calls.
0930
A restart of the watch and a turning on and off of the “Enable Call Forwarding” did nothing to solve the problem. Battery is getting hammered due to the constant push of the watch to try and start call forwarding.
1030
I have had to turn off call forwarding on the watch in the hope that it doesnt completely destroy my battery life for the day. Already down to 60% which is not normal for the watch, its normaly in the early 90% at worst.
1130
Remote access / connection to the watch is working, albeit a bit delayed. Messages are appearing on my watch but the battery life is really not in a good way. My guess is that something isnt behaving itself somewhere between the phone and watch.
1300
I attempt call forwarding again, to see if that is now working, in the hope that it might come back to life. No such luck, just more battery drain as the watch keeps trying to get the phone to allow forwarding of calls. I eventually turn off the functionality again, but I have again taken a hit on the watch battery.
1330
Battery life at 18% and have been forced to start to intermittently turn the watch into “Power Saving Mode” which turns off the mobile data network and pretty much everything else on the phone. (becomes a watch, and not much more)
1530
Turn off “Power Saving Mode” and messages and updates flow to the watch. Battery life down to 8%.
1800
Battery life at 3%
1900
Battery life at 1% and after a lot of hand holding I plug it in to charge. During this whole time it does appear the stepper was working, so no steps were lost.
OVERVIEW
Quite frankly it was useless. I had to manage it a lot due to a software issue from the start of the day. The “Call Forwarding” problem has happened to me before. Although not common, is something that is seen frequent enough to be a pain. Normally a restart of the phone and / or a reconnect of bluetooth between the watch and phone solves this. Given the watch wasnt with the phone, the bluetooth reconnect wasnt possible. Nor was I able to reset the phone as I wasnt physically with it (and nor could I find a way to remotely restart it without needing to root the phone before hand).
Today I am carrying out a controlled version of yesterdays real test. This morning when I left to run erronds I left my phone behind and the “Enable Call Forward” was active. And it worked perfectly without issue. On returning to the phone I turned off the bluetooth on the watch to simulate that the watch is still away from the phone. Lets see how today goes… 0900, battery 90%.