Apple Watch Series 3 Offers Just One Hour Battery Life for Phone Calls, Requires iPhone 6 or Above

Apple Watch Series 3, which the Cupertino-giant announced alongside the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X earlier this week, brings with it a feature that most smartwatches out there don't have: the ability to make cellular voice calls. However, if you're looking to purchase the Apple Watch Series 3, you wouldn't want to make a habit of making phone calls using the watch.

For one, the Apple Watch Series 3 won't get the cellular voice calls option in many regions including India. Second, even for customers in regions such as the United States who could make voice calls, the battery of the Apple Watch Series 3 will be drained drastically every minute they do so.

The Apple Watch Series 3, when connected to the iPhone, can offer up to three hours of talk time. But when connected to LTE, that talk time figure is just "over 1 hour." This means that just an hour-long LTE call with your friend will result in a full-drained Apple Watch Series 3, which will be pretty useless for the rest of the day until you charge it again. The Samsung Galaxy Gear S3 Frontier provides a comparable talk time figure, of 3.1 hours, however there is no mention of talk time on LTE.

One can argue that nobody will be making an hour-long call from the Apple Watch Series 3, as users might use this feature only for very important calls, then again, three or four such calls will have you running for the Apple Watch's charger.

In general, Apple says the Apple Watch Series 3 is designed to last for 18 hours on a single charge. "Apple Watch is so capable you'll want to wear it all day long. So we made sure we gave it a battery that lasts all day, too. Our goal for battery life is 18 hours after an overnight charge, factoring in things like checking the time, receiving notifications, using apps, and doing a 30-minute workout.

"Apple Watch battery testing was conducted by Apple in August 2017 using preproduction Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS) and Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular), each paired with an iPhone." When you're just using the Apple Watch for music playback, the Apple Watch Series 3 will last between 6.5 hours to 10 hours, the company said.

The company has also noted on its website that it will require customers to have iPhone 6 or newer iPhone model to pair the Apple Watch Series 3 with their phone. This means that people have an iPhone 5s - which just currently happens to be the most selling iPhone model in India - won't be able to use the Apple Watch Series 3.