Recent Garmin smartwatch receives fresh update with reports of battery drain issues

Last week, Garmin offered up Beta 9.15 to the Vivoactive 5 series, an update that introduced several new features and bug fixes to its recent smartwatches. Subsequently, the company has released Beta 9.16, which can be downloaded on a Vivoactive 5 directly rather than sideloaded and then installed. For reference, Garmin advises manually triggering the update in the following way:

Like Beta 8.25 before it, Beta 9.16 appears to carry over its predecessor's changelog. Consequently, Garmin's forum post describes the latter adding a jump rope activity, as well as support for new male audio prompts. Likewise, the Beta 9.16 changelog includes identical bug fixes focusing on battery drain, unwanted music playback and a golf activity-related issue.

Nonetheless, complaints remain in Garmin's Community Discussion channel of high battery drain remaining, even after updating to Beta 9.16. Presumably, the company's new beta build contains more changes than Garmin is letting on, with it being unlikely that it would simply repackage Beta 9.15 as Beta 9.16. Please see Garmin's forum post for more details.

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