Solar Watches and Spain

One nuissance of most modern smart watches is that you must charge then once a day, once a week, or once a month. When you’re in Spain though, with a solar watch things change. At first you go from “26 days of battery remaining” to “36 days of battery remaining”, to “39 days remaining”. Before long the watch displays “infinity time remaining”. When you’re in watch the sun charges the batteries faster than normal use depletes the batteries.

If you’re counting steps with the Garmin instinct then you will not need to recharge the battery before you return north, to where the sun shines less regularly. It also helps that the weather is warm enough to keep the watch exposed to sunlight, rather than sleeve light. Sleeve light is not good for solar watches.

On the flipside today I killed the Apple Watch battery going for an 18 minute swim in 14°c water. By the time I finished the swim the battery was low and died within a minute of getting out of the water. If you’re going cold water swimming do not rely on the Apple Watch, especially not a four year old series four. You need a wet suit for the watch, to keep it from cooling too much.

With Suunto diving watches you can log plenty of dives between battery changes. Apple watch batteries are just bad. This is one very good reason not to use the Apple Watch Ultra as a dive computer. You want to trust that a battery will last for the entire dive, many dives in a row. If a dive computer has any tendency to be unreliable then I would not trust it. In cold water diving you want technology that is flawless and faultless. Suunto Dive watches are not expensive and their batteries last for years, depending on diving habits.