A guide to smartwatches and workouts with WIRED and the Galaxy, Samsung and other smart wearables – a short review
The Apple Watch is our favorite for iPhone owners, but Samsung’s Galaxy Watch5 is a great wearable for anyone on Android. We like a lot of other options, with different styles and levels of smarts. We tested many of the Smartwatches and made a list below. Looking for a tracker that tracks your health? We have plenty of more workout friendly options in our guides.
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Getting the Most from the Apple Watch Ultra: Running with Dive Computers on an Ultra-sized Fitness Watch in the Light of a New Certification Program
If you aspire to be better than what you have been achieving, or are an intermediate athlete, Apple Watch Ultra can give you what you need, along with more convenient features. It lasts far longer than before and could just encourage you to get scuba certified.
What I’m really interested in, however, is the upcoming Dive Computer functionality. Later this year, Huish Outdoors says it will release the Oceanic+ app that will let the Apple Watch Ultra work like a full-fledged dive computer. The watch is already certified up to 130 feet deep and comes with EN13319 certification, an internationally recognized standard for recreational dive accessories. We’ll have to see how the software stacks up for this new functionality.
Two, as good as I believe this watch to be, it still won’t replace a dedicated fitness watch like the Garmin Fenix 7 or Epix 2. For folks who use these fitness watches to measure more activities in greater detail, they also offer recovery metrics, which the Ultra simply can’t match. The built-in app on the Ultra doesn’t have any recovery. The folks at Cupertino apparently don’t take rest days in their fitness regimen, but real athletes do.
The face is bright. I had no trouble reading its 2000-nit display in bright midday light, and my aging eyes appreciated its larger type. The blacks were deep and inky, and while I wouldn’t read a novel on the watch, looking at big, bold notifications was a pleasure.
In addition to the regular digital crown and side button (which have been raised and ruggedized so as to be better accessible when wearing gloves), there’s an international orange action button on the opposite side, which can be customized to start and stop workouts or the stopwatch, set a waypoint when hiking, help you retrace your steps if you find yourself lost, start a dive (more on that below), turn on the watch’s “flashlight,” or run a Shortcut that you’ve preprogrammed. I found it very useful for starting and stopping my walk. You can use it to mark your runs.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/reviews/apple-watch-ultra?iid=CNNUnderscoredHPcontainer
A compass app on the Apple Watch Ultra: a new navigation feature for hikers and explorers in Cappadocia, Turkey
As expected, this thing is difficult. It has water resistance to 330 feet (far deeper than any recreational diver should be), IP6X dust resistance, and it’s tested to MIL-STD 810H specifications. Its face is made of a flat crystal, which has not been damaged in a month of trekking across the globe.
The Wayfinder face is special to the Apple Watch Ultra. The face includes compass navigation, current weather condition, sunrise and sunset, your activity rings, elevation, longitude and latitude and your bearing. It’s a lot, but I got used to it. Waypoints and Backtracking are available right from the home screen when I’m out in Cappadocia. If you scroll down on the Digital Crown, you can see the face red at night.
In October, I dropped a few points along my travels: a cool bar in Hungary, a nice stream in Turkey, and the action button which you can program quickly to do this. The new compass app on the watch will show the direction and distance of all your waypoints so that you can navigate back to them. I was only using it to test the feature, but it was designed to keep track of landmarks you would prefer not to misplace while in the wilderness.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/reviews/apple-watch-ultra?iid=CNNUnderscoredHPcontainer
The First Responder Emergency Siren on an Ultra-High-Power, Low-Power Multi-Wavelength Wireless System: The Case for a Small Wrist
The emergency siren is unique to the Ultra. By holding the action button, you can cause an 86db siren to sound that should be able to draw attention to your location if you need assistance. I felt I could see how it would help first responders, because it wasn’t loud to me in my apartment.
If you want to turn on the depth gauge automatically, you have to use the new app. The display changes to show the current time, depth, your maximum depth, the time you spent underwater and the water temperature.
Finally, rounding out the unique hardware features, the Ultra has three built-in mics that use an adaptive beamforming algorithm for improved voice quality and background noise suppression. In my testing, the people I called on the watch generally didn’t realize I was speaking to them on a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio; one said he thought I was using earphones. The voice quality was very good.
Battery life has been very good for me. Even when hiking up and down hills and streets for hours at a time, tracking my sleep and doing it all over again, I never ran below 20% battery life. By the end of the month, I was routinely exceeding the 36 hours Apple rates the battery for. The Apple Watch 8 and earlier models have a significantly improved battery life compared to the new low-power mode.
That said, it still won’t measure up to offerings by Fitbit or Garmin, which measure batteries in days or weeks, not hours. While the Apple Watch Ultra will serve you well on an all-day hike, you will need some way to charge it on a multi-day hike in the backcountry.
One, it’s big. Those with smaller wrists are likely to find it a dealbreaker. You are more likely to get less accurate measurements with a smaller wrists because it has less area for the watch’s sensors. The lower limit seems to be a 130mm diameter wrist, as that’s the smallest wrist Apple’s Ultra bands are designed for.