Well I've had an interesting couple of days with my KW88.

Round Custom Faces
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Well I’ve had an interesting couple of days with my KW88. Having been as disappointed as many with the battery life I resulted to switching to 2G with everything else off - this gave me a full days use with SMS for staying in touch - still not great.
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I emailed Kingwear and gave them stats on how little life I was getting and asked if it was a known problem and if there was a fix (battery or firmware). The overseas Marketing Director gave me this response within a few hours.

Dear Tony,
The battery has been well improved. Please send the feedback to the reseller whom you bought the KW88 from, so that the related sales will do the after sales services.
Good day

Best Regards,
Erik
Marketing Director (overseas)

Shenzhen Kingwear Intelligent Technology Co.,Ltd
http://en.king-world.cn

So I contacted the reseller who’s a seller on AliExpress. He was super responsive and used watsapp for a long dialogue. My firmware version was 20160719 (19th July 16) and he gave me an upgrade to 29th July version (files are dated 30th July)

After a lot of toing and froing and help from Shenzhen, I finally downloaded it and flashed it into my KW88 - happy days.

it remains to be seen how much this addresses the battery life, but its supposed to help significantly.

Really happy with the watch and the capability it has, and well impressed with the support from Kingwear and the Chinese reseller.

Will keep you posted.

This may be old news, but thought it was worth sharing with the community… :O)

Tony

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Is there a community Cloud storage that we could use to store FW, because chinese servers are very often inaccessable for download?
And of course would that be legal? Maybe with consent from the owner/creator?

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Can you share?

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I have the files and instructions, but it is tricky and I needed hand holding through it - I’m not an expert. I would not take responsibility for any difficulties or consequential issues with the end result…

I will find a way to put them somewhere accessible.

Tony

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@tony_bunn ​ What improvements have you noticed with the new FW? Thanks.

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yes would also be interested in a copy. Tia.

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Would you guys say that the Android 4.4 watches have better battery life than the 5.1 ones?

Thanks

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There were no good final inspection takes place on the quality of the batteries. These vary enormously. The internal resistance is quite variable. KingWear must check the quality of the batteries much better !!!

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@Peter_van_Grijfland ​ Dit you already manage to measure internal resistance of your battery?

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All, it sounds like the version I flashed in yesterday is now out as an OTA. I haven’t had much of chance to look at it closely but I think the QR code phone app is different and the cellular settings menu. From a 08:00 start the battery ran out at 17:00 today, so no significant battery life improvement - maybe a bit better. I will check over a longer period with different set ups before I pass judgement.

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It would be nice if there were Android OS watches from well-known brands. I wonder why they only make them with Android Wear?

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@Kenneth_Tan The batteries are not of consistent quality. This I read somewhere that this is due to the internal resistance. Varies quite considerably.

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@Peter_van_Grijfland ​ I know this already. I have built a tool that measures the real capacity and internal resistance.
I thought you already did this. I had no time yet to disassemble the KW88