Managing my Pixel phone and watch’s battery lives is one of the most important problems I’ve been trying to solve for years now. Pixel phones always have battery life issues, and while the Pixel Watch is better than some of its competitors, its battery isn’t stellar either.
I work from home most days and have chargers almost everywhere I go. My office, my bedroom, the living room — there’s always a way to top off. But some days I am in the opposite situation: traveling, running around all day, with no time to stop and charge.
This is when extending battery life becomes crucial for my phone and watch and I realized that one setting I’d previously kept enabled all the time was ruining both devices’ longevity. So I turned it off and now things are significantly better.
How I discovered the Pixel Watch battery drain problem
A clean setup triggered a setting I had forgotten about.
When I first got my Pixel Watch 5, I decided to set it up from scratch instead of restoring my Pixel Watch 4 backup. I went through the entire process, paired it to my Pixel 11 Pro XL, and added it to Google Health. It all went smoothly.
But the next few days, I noticed something weird. My Pixel Watch was barely lasting a full day on a charge, and my Pixel 11 Pro XL was losing its battery quite fast. I used to end the day on a 30-40% charge if I didn’t top it off during the day, and I was suddenly seeing it drop to less than 20% before 8 p.m.
I tried everything. Enabling and disabling some features to gain battery life, looking into menus, getting back my old Pixel Watch 4 and Pixel 10 to compare and see if there’s anything I’d done differently there… to no avail. Until I looked at the one menu that I had forgotten about: Bluetooth.
In my Pixel phone’s Bluetooth connection menu, the Pixel Watch 5 was showing as connected all the time and that’s because I had turned on the Phone calls option. Ouch. I hadn’t paid attention to that and kept it enabled during setup, and I had a feeling it was causing the battery to drain faster.
Using phone calls keeps the Pixel Watch 5 connected at all times, like a pair of earbuds, because that’s what the watch acts like. It becomes like a pair of earbuds that transfer any call from the phone over to the watch. So I decided to turn it off and see.
I had to let go of an important feature to gain battery life
And I would do it again
After turning off the Phone calls feature between my Pixel 11 Pro XL and Pixel Watch 5, I kept an eye on my phone and watch’s battery use to see if they would return to normal. And indeed, they did.
My Pixel 11 Pro XL is back to lasting all day with 6-7 hours of screen use and reaching evening time with 30-40% of its battery remaining. The Pixel Watch 5 now makes it through more than 24 hours of use, just like my Pixel Watch 4 used to do. It’s still not ideal, I’m not sure what the issue is, but I’m trying to troubleshoot other problems.
Looking at my Pixel 11 Pro XL’s battery usage menu, I can see that Google Health is not using the battery and Bluetooth is not tasking the battery more than needed. More importantly, my Pixel phone no longer shows the Watch 5 as always connected.
So the phone and watch have reverted to using Bluetooth Low Energy, where information gets shared between them almost passively, without any always-on active connection.
And yes, of course, you can guess that the downside to all of this is that I can not take any calls on the watch itself. I can pick up or end the call with the call screen that shows up on the watch, but talking directly into the watch or hearing the other person from its speaker are not possible.
If this is a feature you rely on very frequently because you take calls from your watch while your phone is a bit out of reach, and you’re having battery life problems, I’d suggest testing a few days with the option off to see if you miss it and if it affects battery drain.
It might be a tough choice to make for you, but for me, it was relatively easy. I can count on one hand the times I’ve used this since I got the original Pixel Watch five years ago, so I definitely don’t miss it. Longer battery life is a bigger win every day.
I wish we didn’t have to worry about battery life
It feels silly to me that we have to turn off features to make these phones and watches last a proper full day on a charge, especially when these are the features we get sold on when the product is launched and marketed.
What good is the always-on display, or twist to wake, or gestures, or Gemini raise-to-talk, and so on, if they kill my watch’s battery and I have to turn them off to make it to the end of the day without the watch or phone dying on me?
Of course, the longer the battery lasts as a start, the easier it gets to keep more and more features enabled. I’ve had the always-on watch display and twist-to-wake enabled since my Pixel Watch 3 and my battery lasts enough for my use. Unlike my colleague Rajesh, I don’t like wearing a watch that turns its screen off when it’s not being used.
But phone calls? Eh, I’ll leave them behind. They’re not the most important feature I look for in a smartwatch.
