Got Garmin Fenix, use mainly for the sports features. Lasts a week on a single charge including several activities with GPS usage. Can’t imagine having another device to charge daily.
Also, it boggles my mind but the alarms/haptics in my S8 seem weirdly unreliable. Like 10% of the time my alarms just decide not to vibrate and I don't wake up. Tons of people have this problem and it seems to have something to do with the cover to mute gesture, but disabling it in settings doesn't fix the issue.
For those two reasons I'm strongly considering ditching my apple watch and grabbing a garmin instead. Just trying to decide if the move outside of the ecosystem is worth it and which model to buy.
If you're willing to live with not enabling raise to wake, AoD and Sleep Tracking, you might be able to pull off like 20+ days of battery life, not that I would want to, I like it not dropping that far so I haven't tested it fully
I'm not aware of how well do Xiaomi's Bands play with iOS, but might be worth a shot, it's a cheap enough option
Without any activity tracking it lasts ~40 days on a charge, and charges in about an hour. If you live somewhere sunny like I do, even with tracking it lasts practically forever cause of the solar panel.
The flashlight also seemed like a gimmick at first but it's surprised me in how often I reach for it
I don't care about the usual smartwatch crap. I already have a phone, not gonna be sending messages on my watch, but I guess that can be a bummer if you care about it.
This is precisely why I stopped using my Garmin. I did really like it and used it when I was running daily. But when I went on long hikes (8+ miles), I often ran out of battery. The watch charged very fast, but I got sick of having to remember to charge it daily if I wanted to track an activity.
I now wear my Fossil ('dumb'?) watch daily. After maybe five years, I've replaced the battery once. It's so much nicer than a daily recharge.
I’ll randomly once a month remember to charge it and that’s enough. I’ve never had the battery dip below 27 days remaining.
My old garmin was a forerunner 945 and I could about two days of hiking in on a charge, maybe more with battery-saving stuff on, but this is a whole different ballpark now.
Though there's some options that will drastically improve battery life (I think measuring Blood oxygen is a good battery life killer IIRC)
I think most models can easily do 5+ hours of GPS on a single charge.