Golf watch battery in winter: Garmin and Shot Scope claims, owners’ rounds and your UK rights

The clocks go back on Sunday 25 October, and for the next five months most British club golfers will play shorter, colder rounds in failing light. That is the moment many of them look at the watch on their wrist and wonder whether it will see them through a winter, a February trip to the Algarve or a 36-hole day at a Scottish links next summer. The answer printed on the box is not the answer you will get on the course. Garmin counts in hours of GPS, Shot Scope counts in rounds, and neither describes a four-ball in a stiff easterly with the phone buzzing in your pocket. Below are four watches sold new in Britain this autumn, the Garmin Approach S70 in both sizes, the Approach S50 and S44 and the Shot Scope X5, with the makers’ figures, what reviewers and owners report after real rounds, their prices in pounds and what UK law says if the battery gives up early.

To be plain about it: this is a guide to products and to published opinion. Nobody at Panxis Golf has worn any of these watches on a course or timed a battery.

Four watches, five prices, one surprise

On 23 October 2026 a British golf retailer listed all four models in stock at these prices:

• Garmin Approach S70, 47 mm: £529.99, down from a manufacturer’s reference price of £549.99.
• Garmin Approach S70, 42 mm: £499.99.
• Garmin Approach S50: £349.99.
• Shot Scope X5: £279.99.
• Garmin Approach S44: £259.99.

The surprise is at the bottom of the list. In some markets the S44 and the X5 sit at exactly the same price; in Britain this October the cheapest Garmin undercuts the Shot Scope by £20. Shot Scope is an Edinburgh company, so the X5 is the home brand here, but home advantage does not show up on the price ticket.

One more thing has changed on the shelf. Garmin announced the Approach S70’s successor, the Approach S72 in 43 and 47 mm, in early October 2026, and it already sits alongside the S70 in British shops, at £699.99 for the 47 mm. It is outside the scope of this page, which sticks to watches that have had at least one full season in owners’ hands.

Reading the label: what each number assumes

Battery claims for golf watches come in three units, and the unit a maker picks tells you something.

Garmin gives hours of GPS, which is the most useful unit for a golfer, because a round is a block of satellite time. The small print matters, though. Garmin’s figures are “typical” values from its own laboratory, and they assume its default display settings: gesture wake-up when the watch is in everyday mode, and the screen always on while you are golfing. The owner’s manual adds that real life depends on what else is running, and names wrist heart rate, phone notifications, GPS settings and connected sensors.

Garmin also gives days in smartwatch mode. That is the figure that tells you how often the charger comes out during an ordinary working week, not whether you will reach the 18th green.

Shot Scope gives rounds of golf: “2+ rounds” in GPS mode on its technical page, with no figure in hours. A round on a winter weekday in Lincolnshire can be over in three and a quarter hours. A summer medal at a busy club near Manchester can run past five. “Two rounds” covers both, and that is the problem with it.

A rough conversion helps. Allow four and a half hours of GPS for a Saturday round, counting the practice ground and the walk from the car park, because the watch is usually counting from the moment it finds the course. A 15-hour rating then means about three such rounds, and a 20-hour rating about four. In December, with a two o’clock tee time and the light gone by four, you will use a good deal less.

The four watches in detail

Garmin Approach S70

Garmin’s top golf watch from May 2023 until October 2026, when the Approach S72 succeeded it. The S70 remains on sale in two case sizes. The size is not only a matter of wrist: it decides the battery.

• 47 mm: 1.4 inch AMOLED touchscreen, up to 16 days as a smartwatch and up to 20 hours of GPS with all satellite systems in use, according to Garmin’s manual.
• 42 mm: 1.2 inch AMOLED touchscreen, up to 10 days and up to 15 hours.
• On the course: colour hole maps, touch targeting, PlaysLike distances that adjust for elevation, a Virtual Caddie that suggests a club, wind information with a paired phone and automatic shot detection. Off it, a full Garmin smartwatch with music storage and contactless payment.

The two sizes are only £30 apart in Britain this autumn, which makes the choice easier than it looks: unless the 47 mm case is genuinely too big for your wrist, it buys you five more hours of rated GPS and six more days off the course.

Garmin Approach S50

Unveiled at the PGA Show in Orlando in January 2025, the S50 puts most of the S70’s golf features into a 43 mm case.

• Screen: 1.2 inch AMOLED touchscreen.
• Battery: up to 10 days as a smartwatch and up to 15 hours of GPS, on the same default settings.
• Extras over the S44: wrist heart rate, sleep tracking, music storage, Garmin Pay and PlaysLike distances.

Garmin Approach S44

Launched with the S50, the S44 is the plainest of the AMOLED Approach watches, and at £259.99 the cheapest watch on this page in Britain.

• Screen: 1.2 inch AMOLED touchscreen with a silver aluminium bezel.
• Battery: up to 10 days and up to 15 hours of GPS, identical on paper to the S50.
• Left out: no wrist heart rate, no music, no PlaysLike.

The identical rating is worth a second look. The S50 carries sensors the S44 does not, and Garmin itself lists wrist heart rate among the things that shorten real battery life. If you will never look at your heart rate on the 7th, the S44 is the one more likely to beat its own label.

Shot Scope X5

The X5 takes a different route. Its 1.2 inch screen is MIP (memory in pixel), 240 by 240 pixels and 64 colours, with a backlight: the reflective type that is easy to read in bright sun and frugal with power. Its real selling point is shot tracking without a phone. Sixteen small tags screw into the ends of your grips, and the watch records a shot each time a tagged club is used.

• Battery: “2+ rounds of golf” in GPS mode, per Shot Scope’s specification page.
• Controls: touchscreen plus a crown and a back button.
• Weight and cover: 50 grams, two-year limited warranty.

Claimed against reported

Watch	Screen	Rated GPS	Rated smartwatch	UK price, 23 Oct 2026
Approach S70 47 mm	1.4 in AMOLED	Up to 20 h	Up to 16 days	£529.99
Approach S70 42 mm	1.2 in AMOLED	Up to 15 h	Up to 10 days	£499.99
Approach S50	1.2 in AMOLED	Up to 15 h	Up to 10 days	£349.99
Shot Scope X5	1.2 in MIP	2+ rounds	Not published	£279.99
Approach S44	1.2 in AMOLED	Up to 15 h	Up to 10 days	£259.99

What golfers are saying

British reviewers have had the S70 for three seasons and the S44 and S50 for nearly two, and owner threads on Garmin’s forums go back further. On battery, the same themes keep surfacing.

What they like:

• The Garmins come off the 18th with plenty in hand. This is the commonest remark on all three AMOLED models. One British review of the S44 calls its battery life outstanding, another says the reviewer charged it about once a week while wearing it on and off the course, and a published review describes a full day with four to five hours of golf ending with well over half the battery left. For the S70 47 mm, reviewers describe two full rounds on a single charge.
• People stop thinking about the battery. Golfers moving from an older watch, or from a phone app that drained the phone, often say the change that matters is not the number of hours but the end of the nagging worry on the back nine.
• The X5 screen reads well in sunshine. Reviewers who like the X5 tend to mention its legibility in bright light in the same breath as its battery, and one describes two rounds over several days without a charge.

What they grumble about:

• The X5’s “two rounds” is a best case. Owner reports on the X5 are the most scattered of the four. Some do get two rounds; one published review describes the battery showing zero by the end of a single round, with the watch carrying on for a while after. Anyone comparing it with a Garmin should read the claim as the upper limit.
• Extras eat the margin. When a Garmin owner reports a shorter round than expected, the explanation usually turns out to be phone notifications, heart rate during golf, music or a brighter screen, the very features Garmin’s own manual names.
• Old watches stop lasting a round. The most worrying complaint concerns older Approach models whose batteries, after a few years, no longer manage 18 holes. These batteries are not something you replace at the kitchen table, so battery life and the life of the watch are the same thing.
• The paid extras and the shot tracking. On the S44, British reviewers point out that green contours and some wind data sit behind a paid Garmin Golf subscription, and one finds its GPS yardages less precise than a laser. On the X5 and on the Garmins with automatic shot detection, missed or phantom shots annoy owners more than the battery does, and tidying them up after the round is a cost in time.

Nobody is quoted by name, nothing has been counted, and none of these impressions is a measurement. They are the points that recur most in published reviews and owner discussions.

Where British golfers lose battery: winter, trips and the long day

The gap between label and course has four causes: the screen, the phone, the sensors and the age of the battery. In this country, three situations push those causes harder than usual.

The cold. Lithium batteries deliver less of their charge when they are cold, which is ordinary battery chemistry rather than a fault in any of these watches. A watch worn under a waterproof cuff stays warm enough; one left on the trolley handle or in the bag pocket on a frosty January morning at a moorland course may show a lower percentage than you expect. Wear it on the wrist, and charge it indoors at room temperature rather than in a cold car.

The short day in reverse. Winter rounds are shorter, so the risk is not running out on the course; it is getting out of the habit of charging. A watch rated for 10 days off the course will happily go a fortnight between charges in December, and then be at 20 per cent on the morning of the club’s festive foursomes. Pick a fixed evening, say Friday, and charge it every week whether it needs it or not.

The 36-hole day. British golf has plenty of them: club championships and scratch opens with two rounds in a day, society outings with a morning 18 and an afternoon Stableford, and trips to the Scottish coast or the Algarve where two rounds a day is the point of going. Only the S70 47 mm, with its 20-hour rating, has real margin for that on paper. With any of the others, put the charger in the bag and give the watch half an hour on a socket during lunch in the clubhouse. If you fly out for a winter break in Portugal or Spain, the cable is the thing to pack first, because the Garmin charger is a proprietary one and a borrowed phone lead will not fit.

One more British habit worth breaking: the watch that lives on the dashboard of a car parked in full sun at a summer open. Heat is the condition lithium batteries handle worst over the years, and a battery that ages early is, as owners have found, the end of the watch.

If the battery fails: your rights in the UK

Because the battery cannot be swapped at home, a battery that fades early is a fault with the watch, and in Britain you have more than the manufacturer’s warranty to fall back on.

Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, goods bought from a business must be of satisfactory quality, which includes durability. Your claim is against the retailer who sold you the watch, not the maker. In the first 30 days you can reject a faulty watch for a full refund. Within the first six months, a fault is presumed to have been there from the start unless the retailer can show otherwise, and you are entitled to a repair or a replacement. After that you can still claim, but you may have to show the fault was there when you bought it. The limit for bringing a claim is six years from purchase in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and five years in Scotland. A battery that will no longer get through 18 holes in its second season is a reasonable thing to raise with the seller.

Three practical points follow. Keep the receipt or the order confirmation, because the retailer is your first port of call. Buy from an authorised seller, so the maker’s warranty applies on top of your statutory rights. And note the date when the battery first began to struggle, since in any dispute that date is what matters.

The Rules: PlaysLike off when the card counts

Under Rule 4.3a(1), distance-measuring devices are allowed unless a Local Rule bans them, and most club competitions in Britain allow them. What you may not use is information beyond distance, and elevation-adjusted figures such as Garmin’s PlaysLike are exactly that. They must be off in competitions and in any general play round you intend to submit for handicap. A watch telling you that 150 yards plays like 162 uphill is giving you exactly the kind of help the Rules exclude. The S50 and S70 offer a tournament mode for this; the S44 has no PlaysLike to switch off. If you are entering an open or a county event, check the terms of the competition before the first tee. The same question for lasers is covered in our guide to slope rangefinders and the switch your club will check.

Choosing, and getting the most from the one you choose

• One round a week, at your own club: any of the four will do it comfortably. The S44 at £259.99 is the simplest and cheapest way to get there.
• Trips and 36-hole days: the S70 47 mm, the only watch here with a 20-hour rating, and only £30 more than the 42 mm.
• Fitness and sleep tracking during the week: the S50 or the S70, accepting that heart rate on the course shortens the round’s battery.
• Shot statistics without a phone in your pocket: the X5, with “2+ rounds” read as the best you will get.

Whichever you pick, the habits cost nothing. Turn phone notifications off for the round, or at least mute the group chat. Turn off heart rate during golf if you never look at it. Charge on a fixed evening, indoors, rather than on the morning of the round. And before a two-round day, give the watch a full charge the night before and pack the cable.

How this page was put together

This is a presentation of products and a reading of published opinion, not a test. Nobody at Panxis Golf has worn these watches or measured their battery. Specifications come from the manufacturers’ published material: Garmin’s Approach S70 owner’s manual (battery table for both case sizes), Garmin’s specifications for the Approach S50 and S44 as published at their January 2025 launch and reproduced by authorised retailers, and Shot Scope’s technical specification page for the X5.

Prices were read on 23 October 2026, in pounds sterling, on the product pages of American Golf, a British golf retailer, for new watches shown in stock: Garmin Approach S70 47 mm at £529.99 (reference price £549.99 shown), Approach S70 42 mm at £499.99, Approach S50 at £349.99, Approach S44 at £259.99 and Shot Scope X5 at £279.99. The Approach S72 price of £699.99 for the 47 mm was read on the same site the same day. No second-hand price was verified. Prices change often.

What golfers say was read in Golf Monthly’s Approach S44 review and National Club Golfer’s Approach S44 review, and in the reading done for the American edition of this page: reviews by Golfalot, National Club Golfer, TechRadar and Breaking Eighty, owner threads on Garmin’s forums and retailer customer reviews. No British forum thread specific to these four watches was used. The summary of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 is general information, not legal advice. Nobody is quoted by name, nothing is counted, and no impression is presented as a statistic. There is no commercial link on this page, no affiliate arrangement and no commission of any kind. If content on this site is ever paid for by a brand, it will carry an advertising notice at the top of the page, before the first line.