Sony Smartwatch 3: Call For Battery Drain Bug Reports

Sony’s Smartwatch 3 is the company’s third take on smartwatches, albeit the first from the company to feature Android Wear. In many ways, the watch is an upgrade from the Smartwatch 2 as it brings along IP68 rated waterproofing along with the switch to ARM’s Cortex A7 for the CPU.

The recent update to Android Wear based on Android 5.1.1 has brought along woes to an otherwise decent device. Users of the Sony Smartwatch 3 have started facing a rather inexplicable battery drain after this update. The pattern to the drain is not clear enough, and it exists on and off. Possible causes have been guessed at being changes to WiFi drivers, as well as wakelocks caused by the Wear Battery Stats app. Users have tried many fixes, but the issue and its fix still remain vague at best.

However, in a rather rare case (for OEM’s) of actively working with power users and utilizing their experience as well as willingness to assist, Sony Mobile has reached out to users on our forums to draw upon bug reports in an attempt to nail down the cause of this drain and provide an update that actually fixes it. Post from the Sony Mobile’s representative calls for bug reports:

Hi all,

My name is Johan and I work for Sony Mobile. I would like to inform you that our SmartWatch team is looking into this as we speak but it would be great if you guys would be willing to help them out by providing bug reports from the watch.

Please do only take and share reports of when the battery drain is happening.

Here are two ways of taking the report.

* From the Android Wear app on the phone:

• Tap the hamburger menu (3 vertical dots) and select “Report wearable bug”
• Wait for the notification on the watch saying “Bug report captured”
• On the watch swipe the notification left and select “Open”
• Read the information and if you agree, tap “OK”
• You will get a notification on the phone, when you tap it is possible to (for example) upload the bug report to Google Drive and share the link on xda

* From the watch, using the UI:

• Enable Developer options
• Go into “Settings”->”About”
• Tap “Build number” until you see “You are now a developer”
• Go into “Settings”->”Developer options”
• Enable “Bug report in menu”
• Go back to the watchface
• Swipe left 3 times to get to the “Speak now” screen
• Swipe all the way down and tap “Take bug report”
• Wait for the notification on the watch saying “Bug report captured”
• On the watch swipe the notification left and select “Open”
• Read the information and if you agree, tap “OK”
• You will get a notification on the phone, when you tap it is possible to (for example) upload the bug report to Google Drive and share the link on xda

It is a commendable effort on the part of Sony Mobile to acknowledge the existence of battery drain as well as reaching out to the developer community. They have worked for the developer community in the past, and their continued effort on this path is certainly worthy of praise. We hope other OEM’s also follow along and start working with the community rather than against it.

If you have a Sony Smartwatch 3 and have been facing battery drains, capture a bug report and report it in this thread. Please do follow along the instructions and also help keep the thread clean.

What do you think of Sony’s effort of reaching out to power users for help? Does it help instill confidence in the company as a corporate willing to listen to its users after sales? Or does it reek of another case of an update being pushed but still being “unfinished software”? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Read on for more related coverage:

• Sony Brings Android M Dev Preview to 17 Devices
• Sony Xperia Z3+ Now Available in the UK
• AOSP for Sony Devices: Past, Present and Future w/ Alin Jerpelea – XDA:DevCon 2014
• Sony Updates AOSP Sources to Android 5.0.1

The post Sony Smartwatch 3: Call For Battery Drain Bug Reports appeared first on xda-developers.

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