Exchange Calendar Sync makes watch unusable

This could be tricky to diagnose. It sounds as if either the phone or the watch is caught in a loop where it's constantly updating/trying to update. I'd be inclied to suspect the phone, since I assume (maybe wrongly) that the watch-phone interaction is the same regarddless of which calendar).

If I'm right, and it's the phone-to-exchange server connection. maybe deleting and resinstalling the Exchange account would help.

A couple of other things to try, in order of increasing effort:

1. On the phone, reset all the network settings. That might give a kick to whatever is hogging in the background

2. Rest the watch to factory settings; restart the phone. Re-pair the watch and set it up as new.

Fingers crossed

Thank you for posting this. I ordered two watches for my wife and myself, mine showed up early so I let her use mine for a few weeks until her's showed up a couple of days ago. She had no battery issues, but when I reset the watch and configured it for my use, I noticed that I was absolutely hemorrhaging battery life (I was at 35% after 6 hours with very moderate use)- something that she did not experience. Since she hadn't had a problem and it started when I began using it, a hardware issue seemed unlikely.

I have an Exchange account that I use for email but not Calendar, Reminders, or Notes- however, those were set to sync on my phone and to the Watch. I did not have any Calendar entries, but after deactivating the sync for everything other than email and rebooting both devices, the battery drain appears to have stopped. I will need to keep an eye on it for a couple of days to see how substantial of a difference this actually makes, but this definitely seems like a bug.

Well, I can confirm that this was the issue that I was having. Yesterday, with the Exchange Calendar sync active, I was at 38% battery after 6 hours. Today, after turning off the sync (and actually tuning things like animations back on), after 12 hours I am at 62% battery life.

There is definitely something amiss with something in Exchange Calendar sync.

I don't know how you found this out, but it is great that you did. I was having the same problem. About 6-7 hrs battery life, my iPhone drained quickly as well. After I read your post, I checked my stopwatch - also not smooth. So, I removed all "Accepted" and "Declined" emails from my company mail box, and now all seems well again. I hope this doesn't come back too often - but at least there is a simple remedy... Thanks a lot!

Thank you for finding this solution...it worked for me too. Bizarre...I have no idea why it works or how you discovered this.. I went to my inbox and deleted (or could have moved to another folder) all emails that are responses to invitations. I deleted all emails that have the Subject line of the email begin with "Accepted:", "Declined:", and "Tentative:". This immediately worked for me! I now have events posting to the Watch face and the calendar within the Watch is finally populated! Also, I just created a rule within Outlook inbox that will automatically move future incoming messages with Accepted, Declined, and Tentative to a separate folder as you suggested. Thank you! 🙂

You, my friend, are a genius !!

This corrected my watch not syncing with my calendar events. I only use Exchange and the iphone calendar.

THANKS !!

Unfortunately I have the same problem, but the meeting response fix isn't working for me. Everything is good until I activate my Exchange calendar and then I can virtually watch my battery drain. Any solutions others have come across?

Hi CrispyYak, I've had a second occurrence of the issue, and it wasn't fixed as easily either. It was finally fixed when I first archived my exchange calendar for any items older than today and removed all my messages from my outlook inbox to a folder that is not replicated to my iphone. I then unpaired and paired my watch again, and the issue was gone. Perhaps that is something you should try as well...

I had the same issue as the original poster, however, the calendar was not the culprit. I did everything suggested except for archiving old emails and it didn't help. I even ran Microsoft's Calendar Checking Tool (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28786) and moved all offending calendar entries out of the calendar to no avail. In the end I decided to reset the watch will all syncing to my corporate exchange server disabled. By individually enabling them I discovered that the reminders where to blame. When they set to sync with home base, the calendar dots in the iPhone would keep blinking and the watch was unusable with battery life in the order of 2-3 hrs. To disable it go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> The account in question and then disable the Reminders. All is well now.