Did Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Wear Elite chip nuke the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2's battery gains?

Samsung officially announced the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 at its latest Unpacked event, introducing a major silicon pivot to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite SoC alongside a massive 800mAh battery cell. Curiously, despite the larger battery and newer chip, Samsung’s official spec sheet quotes the exact same “up to 60 hours with Always-On Display” runtime as the original 590mAh Exynos W1000-totting Galaxy Watch Ultra.

The spec discrepancy was first highlighted by Phonefuturist on X, who questioned whether the Snapdragon Wear Elite is better than the Exynos W1000, given that it seemingly erased a 35% battery capacity jump.

In Samsung and Qualcomm’s defense, the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 does have a few other changes that could be gnawing at this larger battery. The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 features a Super AMOLED display that reaches 5,000 nits, up from 3,000 nits on the Galaxy Watch Ultra. However, note that this peak brightness applies only to a small part of the display for a small duration. All the display pixels will not reach 5,000 nits simultaneously, nor will this peak be sustained for long on individual pixels.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 also has a slightly higher resolution of 498 x 498 pixels, compared to the Watch Ultra’s 480 x 480, but this is a small difference that doesn’t explain how such a large battery capacity difference yields practically no improvement in battery life.

Looking at the rest of the lineup, we notice similar trends. The Galaxy Watch 8 has a battery capacity of 325mAh and 435mAh for its 40mm and 44mm sizes, respectively, which the Galaxy Watch 9 bumped up to 390mAh and 445mAh, respectively. The bump is small, but Samsung continues to advertise up to 40 hours of usage without Always On Display functionality on all four models.

Samsung also made the same SoC jump here, and it seems to have erased all gains from the larger battery in this case too.

Further complicating the situation is that the newer smartwatches ship with Wear OS 7, which explicitly promised better battery life than Wear OS 6.

There’s a chance that Samsung has taken the lazy route and not updated its battery life figures. If not, it does not instill much confidence in the Snapdragon Wear Elite’s efficiency.

We’ve reached out to Samsung to inquire further on these numbers, and we’ll report back when we learn more from the company. Hopefully, the Snapdragon Wear Elite makes up for this seeming lack of efficiency with better performance and makes the jump away from Exynos worth it. We’ll find out in our review.