Apple Watch Ultra review: personal experience share you buy or not

Apple Watch Ultra

Apple has made a new watch that is very durable and long-lasting. It has a bright screen and a special processor that makes it very fast. It also has some new sensors that help people who go underwater.

As one of the biggest and most recognizable tech companies in the world, Apple has been making waves in the wearable technology space since the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015. 

The latest iteration of the product, the Apple Watch Ultra, is a powerful and stylish device that is designed to help keep users connected, motivated, and healthy.

The Apple Watch Ultra is a square-shaped watch for adults that is titanium coloured. It has a 49 millimetre screen and can be used with an iPhone. It can track activities, heart rate, sleep, and blood oxygen.

The Apple Watch Ultra is the first Apple Watch to feature a larger, 2.5-inch Retina OLED display that is 30 percent larger than previous models. The watch also offers a wide range of features, including a heart rate monitor, GPS, and water resistance up to 50 metres.

The device comes with a variety of apps and features, including Workout, Health, Sleep, and Activity. Each of these apps and features are designed to help users stay connected, motivated, and healthy.

 The Workout app allows users to set goals and track their progress, while the Health app provides data on heart rate, steps taken, and calories burned. 

The Sleep app tracks sleep quality and duration, and the Activity app helps users stay active and keep track of their daily activity.

The Apple Watch Ultra also has a variety of other useful features, such as a built-in microphone and speaker for making calls, an SOS button for emergency situations, and a built-in ECG monitor. Additionally, the device is compatible with Apple Pay and Apple Music, making it easy for users to stay connected and make payments with their watch.

The Apple Watch Ultra is a powerful and stylish device that is designed to help keep users connected, motivated, and healthy. 

With its large display, range of features, and compatibility with Apple Pay and Apple Music, it is the perfect device for anyone looking to stay connected, motivated, and healthy while on the go.

CONCLUSION:

The Apple Watch Ultra is super tough and great for endurance athletes, outdoor adventurers, and water sports enthusiasts. It has a bright display, 36 hours of battery life, and lots of features to help you stay healthy and safe. It also has lots of apps and cellular so you can call and text even without your phone.

 

Apple Watch Ultra Review: Unboxing Craziest Smartwatch

Saturday morning

So on Saturday morning, I woke up with the Apple Watch Ultra charged up to a 100% battery, drove to practise.I had Ultimate Frisbee practise out in New York.

practice

A lot of people don't realise how many calories you burn during a three-hour practice, but there you go.

Finished that, drove home,and then went about the rest of my day. I ended that day going to

sleep with about 69% battery, nice, then sleep with the watch on for Sleep Tracking.

Sunday morning

Then, woke up on Sunday morning with 60%, drove into New York City, again, had another practice, this one a little hotter, sun's baking a little more, three more hours, 

and 2000 calories later, that was over, drove home, went about the rest of my day again, and then again, I slept with the watch on for Sleep Tracking.

Monday morning

 

Woke up on Monday morning, I drove to the studio.

Now it's Monday morning, 11:00 AM at the studio and I currently have 20% battery left. It's pretty good, that's two days, and two nights, and into the third day,

which is far better than I've ever been able to get out

of any other Apple Watch, period, but let's rewind for a second. So we knew something like this was coming, We knew there was gonna be an upgraded, ruggedized Apple Watch in some way,

and I think a lot of people sort of assumed it would be called the Apple Watch Pro, but instead, we got this thing, and it's called the Apple Watch Ultra. The thing is though, it would've actually been totally reasonable and probably kind of perfect

if they had also called this the Watch Pro, and that's just because of the way Apple treats the word pro nowadays like Apple's tossed the name pro around the highest end versions of almost all of their products 

• iPhone Pro,
•  MacBook Pro, 
• AirPods Pro, 
• iPad Pro, 
• Pro Display,

and each of these expensive devices has some set of features that a smaller fraction

of the population can actually take advantage of and use. Now, whether that makes you a pro or a hardcore user or an enthusiast, or a wannabe pro, like 

What is a pro AirPods user anyway?

That's a debate for another day but it's the same thing with this Apple Watch Ultra. I've been using it for about a week now, and the way I think about it is there's a core group of people for which the Apple Watch SE

actually covers all of their needs, and that's like most of the population, but then there's an additional group a little bigger than that, for which the standard Apple Watch, 

which is now Series 8, covers all of their possible uses,

so, you know, it adds the always-on display, the different sizes, et cetera. It's already a really versatile smartwatch but there's still some people around the outskirts, for whom the regular Apple Watch still wasn't enough, and Apple naturally I still want those people. So this is an $800 watch that has some extra premium features and specs

that are amazing, and definitely overkill for most people, like the ones in the middle of my illustration but it's attractive for the most extreme users,

The adventurers who go on serious hikes, or go diving, or run marathons, or do triathlons.

So, there's really three main things that they added to this watch over the regular one

which are ruggedness, features, and battery, and they all kind of go hand in hand.

For ruggedness, well, it's pretty obvious, they just beefed this thing up,, so it's now much bigger, 49 millimetres diagonally,

but it has the shapes and materials now of a watch that should be much harder to break. 

It's a titanium case with a ceramic back.

It has much bigger buttons that don't have quite as much travel as I expected,

but they are easier to press with gloves. There's the bigger crown, and then the crown guard on the side here, it's a very distinct look,

and then the display at the top here is a flat sapphire crystal, instead of the normal

curving over the edges, with this slightly raised lip all the way around the screen, so it's protected from corner impacts.

To me, it's pretty huge, like this is a pretty massive watch. I will say it is not nearly as heavy as it looks, which is pretty nice, but it does visually stand out for a couple of reasons.

One, this is the only colour, so this is the exposed titanium, it looks very silver, I wish it came in black because black is slimming,

like you can make a black watch look smaller with a black band, but that would admittedly require black paint, which would probably get like scratched, and then the silver would show through,

and then it would look pretty gnarly after a while, so I get it, maybe they could anodize it. I don't know, but yeah, a big silver watch on A skinny wrist looks big.

But then also, two, this shape, seems like this is a big watch to me. Someone 

who wears pretty much only smartwatches, right? 

And smartwatches are kind of weird shapes sometimes, like it's a computer on  the wrist type of a look, it's sort of just a block, but

in the overall watch world, the Apple Watch Ultra is actually

now here near the biggest watch you'll see, like some people are very used to much larger watches on their wrists actually, and especially those people on the outskirtsI was talking about earlier,

they're fairly used to wearing some of these massive Garmins, or Suuntos, or even specialised activity-specific equipment, like dive computers,

that'll make the Apple Watch Ultra look compact. So the whole like this-watch-is-huge thing is very much up to context. But the thing is like a lot of these watches here are bigger than the Apple Watch, but they are watch shaped, they're circular up front, and then they have this taper around the wrist

at the top and the bottom, so they don't look like they stick out nearly as much, even though they do. Where the Apple Watch just doesn't taper at all,

it's just like a block, so yeah, the computer on the wrist thing, I don't know, I actually don't mind the aesthetic, like I said, I just wish it came in black

That would've been nice. I wonder if ColorWare is gonna be able to paint these things. Anyway, that's the build quality, but the other two things that make the Ultra ultra are battery and capability. Battery being pretty simple,  it's a much bigger watch,

and it has room for more battery inside, but we'll get to that in a second, but the capabilities just come  in the form of extra features. So the extra microphone and extra speakers for better audio quality in windy environments

Dual-frequency GPS

the dual-frequency GPS for more accurate and reliable GPS in tougher settings like forests, or in cities between skyscrapers. 

The WR 100 water resistance rating for submergence up to a 100 metres. The new 2000 nits max brightness for this display, which means it's the most visible outdoors

that I've seen a smartwatch OLED, plus it makes for a nice flashlight if you need it.

And most importantly, the new extra button, 

so that bright international orange coloured button is called the action button, and it can be mapped to, right now, any one of these eight things.

So I currently have mine to just open the new Workout Selector. I pick the type of workout, 

and then hit the action button again to get it started,and then once you're in an activity, there's again a layer of customization to what this action button can do.

So maybe marking segments or laps inside a track workout or marking when you switch from the bike to the run in a triathlon, all kinds of stuff like that. I really like having I,

I did feel like I accidentally pressed it a lot just because of the way I grabbed the watch, and adjusted the crown, but I pretty quickly got used to that too.

I think the most noticeable thing that this Apple Watch has over other Apple Watches is gonna be the battery life.

So this, like I said from the beginning, two full days, and two full nights, with plenty of room to spare, 

That's easily better than, it's roughly double what I was able to get out of my Apple Watch Series 7. The thing is while that is a massive improvement 

for an Apple watch, it's still nowhere near the other highest end watches, which many of 'em are expected to go weeks, months, even years without even thinking about charging, this one right here, this Casio watch.

It's Casio, right? 

Casio Pro Trek, which has solar charging, has never been charged. It has virtually infinite battery life, it didn't even come with a charge.

In this watch world a two-day battery life is not that impressive. But really that brings me to the ultimate question with this Ultra, 

which is how are you going to be using this watch? 

Like if you're one of these people on the outside here that doesn't use an Apple Watch, Apple was trying to find a reason you didn't use it

and add the features or capabilities to make you actually want to use it now, because of course they wanna bring you into the ecosystem. So some of these people over here

like these are frequent scuba divers, and they've been using dedicated dive computers

ranging from giant watch to tablet on the wrist to track depth and directions, and a bunch of other

safety metrics underwater. Now the Apple Watch Ultra has added that WR 100 water resistance, up to 100 metres. There's a new dive app to track some pretty basic stuff,

like depth and give you times for safety stops on your way back up for recreational diving,

things like that, but then Apple also partnered with a third party company for this Oceanic app That's coming later this year. 

That seems to do basically everything that the pro dive computers do, including air integration, pretty much the only thing it doesn't do

that some extreme technical divers might want is tank pressure monitoring and depth monitoring past 40 metres.

Now some of these people way over here, these people are really adventurous hikers, like not the normal beaten-path casuals  finding popular hikes on Google,

I mean these people are going off and carving their own path for miles and miles in the middle of nowhere sometimes for days at a time. 

So the Watch Ultra's got now a bunch of navigation related features,

there's dual-frequency GPS for more accurate pinpointed GPS, even in challenging locations, but then the new Compass The app is pretty impressive. It lets you set unlimited waypoints

so that you can navigate back to them at any time, and you can track your exact walking path with a backtrack feature in case visibility is difficult, ,or you need the watch to guide you back where you came from. 

There's also a super loud 86 decibel siren that can play from the new speaker system  if you find yourself completely lost with no one around,

and yes, it is actually impressively loud, and you can hear it from probably a quarter mile away,

and there's a new way finder watch face by default that sort of puts all this stuff right at your fingertips, including a live compass

That's super smooth. I think a lot of people will just leave this face on all the time, even if they don't need it, but then some of the other people up over here are ultra endurance athletes,

and of course the name sort speaks for itself here.Honestly, the Apple Watch just didn't last long enough for these people's Ironman races, and ultra-marathons, and Spartan races.

So the new Watch Ultra's got the dual frequency GPS, which is huge, and the action button is nice too, but the significantly improved battery life is huge for these.

Now, it's not gonna last a week or a year, like some of the stopwatches or simpler ones do,

but now it's just about double the battery life of the standard Apple Watch, and it's finally up to the task of some of the most extreme GPS-heavy endurance athletes,

and even if it isn't Apple has mentioned that there's this battery optimization setting feature

coming later this year, that it's not the Low Power mode, that's already existing in the watch,

but it's an extra setting within Workouts to ping GPS and heart rate less often. So in a normal workout for me which is it's a disc sports workout for an ultimate practice, basically it's measuring heart rate constantly,

like every few seconds, which is super helpful, you can see how quickly you recover, you can see when you're in certain heart rate zones during the course of a practice, but if you're running like a 100 miles, or something ridiculous, you don't need multiple pings every minute. 

You just need a broader sense of how it's going, so that's a helpful feature for these people, and when you turn that on, it should essentially triple the life of the Apple Watch. Apple says up to 60 hours.

I don't have it yet, 'cause it doesn't exist, so I can't tell you exactly how well it does, but that's a useful feature. They even have a trio of new $99 bands for this watch for these activities. 

So there's a Trail Band, which looks kind of sick. Then the Alpine Loop, and the Ocean Band. 

As a reviewer, I wanna like, I wanna test all these activities, and like go, okay, I guess I gotta run an ultra marathon now, and like scuba diving, but I can't remember the last time I was 10 metres underwater, let alone 40.

So I can't test all of this stuff, but I actually reached out and heard directly from these people on my podcast, a Waveform podcast. I'll link the episode specifically below the Like button, so you can listen to it.

But I had a diver, an ultra runner, and an alpinist. And so we asked them about the risk computers they currently use, and whether or not

They think this Apple Watch Ultra is good enough to replace them.

And through those conversations, one by one, they each came to the end with

basically the same conclusion which is that yeah,

looks like they kind of did everything that they were looking out of an Apple Watch.

I'll link it below so you can hear exactly what they said. And then there's me, so, you

I'm a tech reviewer, and an Ultimate Frisbee player.

So turns out the normal Apple Watch is actually enough for me. Like I said, a normal ultimate workout or any sort of training we do is typically just a ton of heart rate readings, there's not a bunch of GPS pings or elevation tracking or anything like that,

so it's not super demanding, but still on the ultra, I get to reap the 

benefits of the battery

only running down 20% during a practice, instead of 40%, and then

 The more accurate GPS readings and the brighter screen are kind of nice to have on other activities, maybe the occasional bike ride, or a hike, or stuff like that, and it might be better for you too.

It's one of those things where I think generally if you have to ask, you probably don't need it,

but it really reminds me of the ROG Phone, like that thing is complete, complete overkill for almost every human on the planet with all its crazy gaming features and absurdly high end specs,

but also all those features for gaming also happen to make it better for media and regular use, and it's basically the same thing here, like this is technically speaking

the best Apple Watch they've ever made, it's got the longest battery life,

• the biggest, brightest display,

• the best microphones and speakers,

And it's the most accurate trekking package yet.

I mean, if your wrists are big enough, then yeah, you can daily this too, it's kind of put itself

in this unique category where it's replacing some of these extreme like dive computers or GPS watches

that you'd normally take off when you're done with your workout, but it's an Apple Watch

through and through at the end of the day, you can wear this thing

every single day. 

I just don't know if you can dress this thing down as much as you could a regular Apple Watch. 

Like fun fact, I wore the Apple Watch Series 7 in midnight with my tux at the Met Gala and it didn't look insane to me anyway, get a nice, 

you can't really hide it as much, you might have a little more trouble with that.  But hey, if you know what you're getting into, the ROG phone is a pretty good phone, and if you know what you're getting into,

The Apple Watch Ultra is a pretty good Apple Watch.

So that's been it, thanks for reading.

Catch you guys in the next one, peace