We know more about the Apple Watch’s battery life, and it’s not great news

There’s an inherent flaw with battery technology at the moment, namely the fact that we have a lot of trouble shrinking large capacity batteries — meaning smaller gadgets have to have smaller batteries. Smartwatches are the perfect example of this, and it looks like the Apple Watch isn’t going to be any different.

A new report from 9to5Mac claims that the Apple Watch itself will only last 2.5-4 hours of ‘active use’ before it dies. Well that’s certainly not very good news is it?

Apparently, despite previous assertions that the Apple Watch would last a day, the watch’s retina display and A5 processor are a serious power drain, and Apple is having to change its stance on the device’s battery life:

As of 2014, Apple wanted the Watch to provide roughly 2.5 to 4 hours of active application use versus 19 hours of combined active/passive use, 3 days of pure standby time, or 4 days if left in a sleeping mode. Sources, however, say that Apple will only likely achieve approximately 2-3 days in either the standby or low-power modes…

We don’t really know what classifies as ‘active use’ at this point, but the report does claim that using the fitness tracking functions will give the Apple Watch a four hour battery life. That’s certainly a heck of a lot better than two and a half hours, but it’s not great. Nobody is going to spend four hours in the gym, but losing a quarter of the battery life after an hour of exercise is not going to make many people happy.

Of course most people don’t use smartwatches as much as they use their phones, so that’s going to help the overall battery life. Then again other recently released smartwatches tend to last a full day, even if users do use it on a semi-regular basis.

Various factors come into play where battery life is involved, and we’re not going to have a definite idea of how the Apple Watch will last day-to-day until it’s released (rumoured to be sometime in March).