Why adding seconds on the Fitbit Surge clock may cause Battery Drain?

[Hat_Servant]

Fitbit Surge uses Memory LCD for displaying the time. The display is very energy efficient when displaying static image as the information is stored in the LCD hardware itself resulting in drawing very little current from the battery. The clock needs to be refreshed once every minute. Since the Fitbit clock is always on, if Fitbit decides to display seconds, the display will use four times as much current every second to refresh the display for the second hand. It will cause  drain on the current .Since Suege uses 37Kwh LiPo cell the battery  may need to be charged every day.

The only way to get around will be to increase the ampreage of LiPo cell in future refresh or allow the clock to be shown on demand (Glance). I guess that may be the reason the Fitbit has not added the second hand for the clock (my opinion personally) as it is very easy to do via firmware upgrade. I am basing this information based on knowledge of memory based LCD display that is being used currently on the device.

[WendyB]

Might want to add to Features request forum

[SunsetRunner]

How is it goin' @Hat_Servant thank you very much for sharing this with us. As well as @WendyB I think this would have a nice place on the "Feature Request" section so our developers might take it into consideration in the future. 

Keep me posted. I wish you a wonderful day! 😉

[Hat_Servant]

I looked into the feature Request list. It has been requested numerous time by many users. I decided not to add it as I think the development team is aware that adding seconds to the clock is one of the most requested feature. I was just trying to sway the discussion that providing a clock with seconds may drain the battery four times faster unless the fitbit team does away with the option of 'Always On' clock or comes with a Surge 2 with a 200mh LiPo battery.

[Rich_Laue]

I think your math is a little of, while it is true the display will use 4 times the power, the display is not the only thing that uses power.  So say the display now uses 2 units of power out of the 25  units the Surge consumes. We can then assume the display will, with seconds, will now use 8 units. This will bring the watch up to 31 units or an increase of 24%., not 4 times, more.

Since we do not know the distribution of battery useless in the Blaze, and it is more likely that the display uses a lot less power, we will go with .5 units of power out of 50. Now the display using 4 times will be 2 units, and the total use is 51.5. That would then be a 3% increase.

[SunsetRunner]

How is it goin' @Hat_Servant thank you for taking the time to answer. Yes in fact, there are similar suggestions and your reaction is greatly appreciated. Have you voted for them? I suggest to vote for this one with more votes accumulated. 

I wish you a beautiful day! 😉