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Always-on Display (AOD)

Contents

Always-on Display (AOD) is a feature available on most modern Garmin watches with AMOLED screens. When enabled, your watch display remains visible at all times, but switches to a low-power mode to conserve battery life.

How it works

  • Normal mode: Full brightness, all features visible
  • AOD mode: Reduced brightness, simplified display
  • Activates automatically when your wrist is lowered
  • Returns to full brightness with wrist gesture or button press

Battery Impact

Using AOD will impact battery life. The exact impact depends on:

  • Your watch model
  • Display brightness settings
  • Watchface complexity
  • How often you view the watch

Enabling/Disabling AOD

  1. On your watch, press and hold the Menu button
  2. Navigate to System > Display
  3. Find the "Always On" option
  4. Toggle to enable or disable

AOD Brightness limits - AOD DIM

Garmin set up some restrictions for AOD mode to prevent burn-in and save battery. On most devices the limits are Max 10% brightness or max 10% of pixels lid up.

When you go over these limits, the watch screen will turn off. To prevent going over these limits, you find a setting called "AOD-DIM" on all my watchfaces. The AOD DIM dimms the screen so you can stay under the 10% brightness limit. Setting it to 0% give you the most brightness possible in AOD mode.

AOD Shift - Burn-In

All my watchfaces have a feature called "AOD Shift". This feature moves everything on the screen around in AOD mode, to prevent burn in. In the settings you can set how many pixels it offsets the screen every minute. Set this to 0 to keep everything in place.

Left: Normal, Right: AOD, shifted 5 pixels