The eternal problem with Android Wear is how to optimize functionality while conserving as much battery as possible while using the battery saver mode. There are a host of tips and tricks including turning off the Always On feature that makes the Android smartphone watch passive when the display is off and also disabling the Tilt to Wake screen that puts the watch on when your tilt the watch either way.
While these hacks are important in themselves, they are not enough and this is where the battery saver mode comes in. However, some of the drawbacks of the battery saver mode may put people off from using this feature on their Android watches, foremost amongst them being that they might miss important notifications on their watches such as alarms for meetings etc. Android has come up with a fix for this in its new Android software Oreo and users of the Android watches may find this very useful when they update their devices when the new Android version comes out.
Android Battery Saver Mode Using Android Oreo
Google has introduced a host of changes to the stock battery saver mode. In the dev preview runs of the new version of the Android software, we have already found out that the status or the navigation bar has been changed to bright orange instead of the previous red. You now also have the option of changing the navigation bar to your convenience with the new Android instalment.
The small stuff has really been tweaked in the battery saver mode, and we can now see Google add the small but rather convenient accessibility features for Android Wear on AOSP. This means that if you switch to the battery saver mode on your beloved Android device it will have the device vibrate when any priority notification comes. What this means for the Android Wear user is that while the superfluous notifications for messages and other such notifications won’t disturb you, you won’t be missing important ones like alarms.
While on the scale of what changes Android could have made, this is a small one, it may be seen as quite important in the long run since most Android Wear devices actually do not have speakers and this may be necessary to keep make them useful. Only a select group of watches (including the Huawei Watch) have a speaker. Android phones, however, do possess speakers and they will not be vibrating for alarms in the battery saver mode – this tweak is for Android watches. The very useful change was committed to AOSP on this June 6th and it is scheduled to appear in the next make of the Android Wear(which means either 2.1 or 3.0) and will be primarily based on the new Android Oreo software.
This you can work out by switching to the battery saver mode and then setting an alarm on your watch device and simultaneously sending a Hangouts message. You will find that the alarm produces vibration on your device but the Hangouts message does not. This feature will help you in many a places that you previously missed out. Now you don’t have to worry about missing alarms when you switch to the all important battery saver mode in libraries or meetings or when you are running low on charge after a long day.
This is not a feature that you can immediately take advantage of, though, and users will have to wait for the next version of the Android software to know more about this feature and a host of other features and improvements that Google plans to introduce with Oreo.
Have you checked out the latest Oreo yet? Which features stood out the most for you – let us know in comments below.
