Apple launched the Watch Series 8 last year, updating the Watch Series 7 with a new S8 chip, shock detection, and temperature sensor. And since rumors indicate that the Watch Series 9 will have the same design, we thought we should check out how the Watch Series 8 holds up in the long run.
Should you wait for the Watch Series 9, which may cost more without offering much, or should you get a Watch Series 8 once it’s discounted? Here’s our long-term review of the Apple Watch Series 8 after over six months of use to help you decide.
Project
The Apple Watch Series 8 is similar to its predecessor. The 41 mm aluminum model (GPS + cellular), the subject of this review, also has the same dimensions (41 x 35 x 10.7 mm) and weight (32 g) as its Watch Series 7 counterpart. As already evident from name, the case of the Aluminum version is made of 100% recycled aluminum, while the 1.69″ screen is covered with Ion-X glass (sapphire glass on stainless steel models).
On the left side of the Apple Watch Series 8 is the speaker, while on the right is the microphone, flanked by a recent/side button and a digital crown with a red accent. The button and crown have good feedback, with the latter offering responsive scrolling, which in my experience was smoother than scrolling on the screen. Both have retained their tactility well after all these months of use. The crown is also used to take ECG measurements, but we’ll talk more about that in the Performance section.
Speaker on the left side • Microphone on the right side, flanked by the recent button and digital crown
The glossy rear panel, made of ceramic, supports magnetic charging, with the heart rate sensor and SpO2 sensor placed on a raised plate. This helps prevent dirt buildup over time and ensures adequate skin contact for accurate measurements. There’s also a temperature sensor on the crystal, with another below the display.
The back of the Watch Series 8 has two buttons to release the bands. Our unit came with the regular black-colored Sport Band package, including S/M and M/L bands, which can fit 130-200mm wrists. These are made with a “custom high-performance fluoroelastomer” which, Apple says, makes them “durable and tough, yet surprisingly soft.”
Well, the bundled straps are really soft, and given the weight of the watch, wearing them to sleep at night and during workouts was a comfortable experience. The straps have a pin-and-tuck closure, which initially made it a real chore for me to wear the Watch Series 8 and created comical scenes since I hadn’t put something on my wrist with straps like that in a while (it was l ‘Oppo Watch a few years ago, and I had a similar experience). It may take some getting used to for those inexperienced with straps like this, but once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty quick and easy to put the watch on your wrist.
Apple Watch Series 8 41mm Aluminum came bundled with Black Sport Band
However, due to the bundled straps’ design, which created rashes on my wrist, and my preference for a more traditional design, I ended up getting a couple of third-party straps. And since we’re talking about Apple, there are plenty of accessories, so there was no shortage of choice.
It’s also worth mentioning that the Apple Watch Series 8 is IP6X dustproof and has water resistance up to 50 meters, making it “swim-proof.” This obviously means you don’t have to take it off your wrist when you go to shower.
I like the overall design of the Apple Watch Series 8. Yes, it looks similar to its predecessor, but it’s sturdy and, despite a few drops on the floor during months of use, it hasn’t suffered a single scratch.
Screen
The 41mm model of the Apple Watch Series 8 packs a 1.69″ screen with a resolution of 430×352 pixels, while the 45mm version features a 1.9″ screen with a resolution of 484×396 pixels. However, both use Always-On Retina LTPO OLED panels with peak brightness up to 1,000 nits and sapphire glass protection.
The Watch Series 8’s Retina display is vibrant and has 3-level brightness adjustment. And at 100% brightness, I could view content on the screen outdoors, under strong sunlight, without any problems. The smartwatch also has an ambient light sensor for automatic brightness adjustment, which works well.
The Watch Series 8’s screen has good touch response with a good tactile feel, and typing on such a small screen didn’t prove to be as difficult as I thought it would be, mostly due to the swiping gestures, which worked well for a screen of this size.
That said, the smartwatch comes loaded with just one watch face, but you get tons of other options through the Watch app on your paired iPhone grouped into more than two dozen categories.
Many of these watch faces are compatible with Always-On Display (AOD), which can be enabled/disabled from the Settings app on the smartwatch and via the Watch app on the paired iPhone. It also features wear detection to turn off AOD when you’re not wearing the Watch Series 8.
However, you can’t schedule the AOD to automatically turn on and off at a certain time every day, so the screen stays on at night during sleep mode. This may cause discomfort to others in the room at night even at lower brightness and waste battery unnecessarily as well as increasing the chances of incorrect tapping on the display.
That doesn’t mean there is no solution to this. You can use the Cinema Mode (also known as Theater Mode) feature on watchOS to keep your Apple Watch Series 8 screen dark while you sleep. It can be enabled from the smartwatch Control Center accessible by swiping up on the home screen. It is represented by the two mask icon.
The two-mask icon next to the bell icon represents Cinema mode
Let’s hope Apple allows users to program Always-On Display with the next version of watchOS and Apple Watch to improve the experience.
Software
The Apple Watch Series 8 is compatible with iPhone 8 or later running iOS 16 or later. It launched with watchOS 9.0 and currently runs watchOS 9.6.1. The Series 8 relies on three apps – Watch, Health and Fitness – that come pre-installed on the iPhone 13 I used for this review.
Check out the app
The Watch app is used to set up the Watch Series 8 and tinker with its general settings, while the Health app covers all your health data, including sleep, heart rate, ECG, blood oxygen level and step count, among the other things. The Fitness app, as evident from the name, shows all the information about indoor and outdoor training. Also view all the rewards you’ve earned and your mindfulness activity data – Reflect and Breathe.
Health application
The Watch and Fitness apps have a simple and uncluttered user interface, which I found quite easy to use. The Health app isn’t complex either, but Apple could have done a better job of displaying some health data.
Fitness application
Also, I would have liked to see one app for everything as a one-stop solution instead of having to juggle three different apps. We’ve seen other brands, including Amazfit, do this for their wearables, so it’s not impossible.
The Apple Watch Series 8 is powered by Apple’s S8 dual-core processor, which, along with watchOS 9, offered a smooth experience as the smartwatch had consistently snappy performance throughout all these months of use.
The Watch Series 8’s user interface is simple and straightforward, like the apps mentioned above. A swipe down on the home screen brings up the notification center, while a swipe up opens the control center which gives you access to customizable quick settings. Swiping left or right does nothing and I find it wasteful. Apple could have allowed users to access their favorite apps/features by swiping left/right on the smartwatch home screen.
Apps installed on the smartwatch, including Settings apps, are accessible by pressing the crown. By default, apps are presented in a grid view, but you can change it to a list view. The crown is also used to exit the app. The side button, however, allows you to switch between recent apps.
You can change the app view from Grid View to List View via your Watch Series 8 or paired iPhone
Most UI navigation on the Watch Series 8 with watchOS 9 depends on these two buttons, particularly the crown, as it’s used to view the app list, return to the previous screen, and exit the app. A more open approach towards gesture-based navigation would have been appreciated as it would have allowed for better customization of the physical buttons. An example is swiping left on the home screen to access all apps and swiping right for app switching.
The Watch Series 8’s reliance on the crown to return to the previous screen or exit the app proved more inconvenient when dealing with notifications.
If you tap grouped notifications from an app in the notification center, a list of notifications appears, and if you click on a particular notification to expand it, you’ll be presented with related quick actions for certain apps. But if you don’t want to take any action and go back, you can’t just swipe right like you do on an iPhone. You need to tap the “Done” button in the top left corner of the screen or press the crown or side button to go back. And if you swipe down while viewing an expanded notification or group of notifications from the same app, the grouped notification or notifications will be cleared from both the Watch and the connected iPhone.
I really wish Apple would let users swipe right to return to the previous screen, whether it’s the notification center or some apps, including Settings and the App Store. Furthermore, notification management could also use some refinement.
UI navigation is similar to that of the iPhone in that a swipe to the right does not always take you back to the previous screen. You have to press the arrow/back button in the top left corner of the screen, which, like on the iPhone, seems inconsistent and counterintuitive to me.
Features and performance
The Apple Watch Series 8 is largely identical to its predecessor but comes with a new chip (S8 vs. S7), a temperature sensor, and shock detection. It also comes with the usual set of health and fitness features, including real-time heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen level measurement, sleep monitoring, ECG, sedentary reminder, pedometer and indoor and outdoor workouts.
Beyond that, the Apple Watch Series 8 features camera and music controls, weather forecast, compass (with Backtracking), find phone, stopwatch, countdown timer, fall detection, noise monitoring, and GPS ( L1). The Watch Series 8 also features temperature tracking, which is only useful for women as it is used for cycle tracking with retrospective ovulation estimates to help women better understand their menstrual cycle.
The Apple Watch Series 8 has 32GB of built-in storage, allowing users to download music to the smartwatch for offline playback. You can listen to them through the watch’s speakers if you’re feeling adventurous, or connect the watch to any Bluetooth headset to listen to music through the Apple Watch without needing your iPhone.
This is useful when you go for an outdoor workout since you don’t have to carry your iPhone with you, especially if you have the LTE model, which allows you to make and answer calls without being connected to an iPhone.
By the way, the Apple Watch Series 8 comes with Apple’s W3 wireless chip and U1 chip and supports Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi (2.4GHz and 5GHz) connectivity.
Speaking of health and fitness features, the Apple Watch Series 8 automatically measures heart rate in one-minute intervals and there is no way to change it, which is not ideal as allowing users to increase the gap by even A few minutes would help prolong battery life. However, automatic heart rate measurement at one-minute intervals is recommended on most wearables for more accurate results, so I understand why Apple didn’t provide this option.
That said, if you don’t want to rely on automatic tracking data, you can manually measure your heart rate whenever you want via the Heart Rate app on the smartwatch. It’s fast and displays your resting heart rate, with detailed analysis available in the Health app on your paired iPhone. The heart rate sensor records the pulse accurately most of the time, but it is still best not to use it for diagnosis.
The Watch Series 8’s ECG sensor can generate an ECG similar to a single-lead electrocardiogram with the ECG app on the smartwatch. All you have to do is place your finger on the crown for 30 seconds and, as with heart rate monitoring, you can find the ECG data in the Health app. I had no means of verifying its accuracy, but in any case we advise you not to use such data as a basis for diagnosis or treatment.
Put your finger on the digital crown for ECG measurement
The Watch Series 8’s SpO2 sensor can also measure blood oxygen levels throughout the day like the heart rate sensor, including in Sleep Focus and Cinema modes. However, you can also take on-demand readings using the Blood Oxygen app on the smartwatch, which takes 15 seconds to measure. The readings were mostly accurate, and you can find related data in the Health app. Just don’t use it for diagnostic purposes.
Next is sleep tracking, which breaks down your total sleep hours into four stages: core sleep (also known as light sleep), deep sleep, REM sleep, and wakefulness. Get the previous night’s sleep metrics on your Apple Watch via the Sleep app, which shows your total hours of sleep, times you fell asleep and woke up, and time spent in the aforementioned stages during sleep. It also shows the average sleep time for two weeks. A detailed breakdown is available via the Health app on iPhone, where the Sleep section also displays information about your breathing rate and heart rate during sleep, along with other data, including time spent in bed, which I found interesting.
However, in my experience, the sleep tracking on the Apple Watch Series 8 was disappointing and unreliable. It accurately monitored waking times, but not falling asleep times.
The Watch Series 8’s sleep tracking algorithm records your sleep duration even when you’re lying on a couch or bed watching videos on a phone/tablet and moving regularly. I’ve used smartwatches in the past with similar behavior, and I would have been fine with the Watch Series 8 if it hadn’t given me Reminders when the algorithm thought I was sleeping. It’s strange. Additionally, the Health app doesn’t allow you to edit your sleep record, which means you’re left with an overall inaccurate sleep analysis since the data used for this is incorrect. Apple lets you add sleep data via the Health app, so I hope the company allows users to edit existing sleep records with future updates.
It’s also worth mentioning that the Apple Watch Series 8 doesn’t track afternoon naps even after you turn on Sleep Focus mode, which is a shame since even watches that cost less than half the price of the Apple Watch do this. Let’s hope Apple brings this feature to some, if not all, of its smartwatches with a software update.
The Apple Watch Series 8 supports various indoor and outdoor workouts. Obviously I couldn’t try them all. I mainly used the Indoor Walking and Outdoor Walking workouts. And while the step counts in both modes weren’t as completely accurate as most other smartwatches, the margin of error was minimal enough that it wasn’t a concern. However, for some reason, the indoor walking used GPS, which I find unnecessary as it is something more useful with outdoor workouts. Outdoor Walking mode used GPS, but it didn’t track the route of my walk and only pinned the starting point of my walk on the map, which I didn’t find helpful.
Additionally, the Apple Watch Series 8 also asked me if I wanted to end my indoor/outdoor walk despite the fact that I hadn’t slowed down or taken a break for a few minutes for the algorithm to show such a request. This started with the watchOS 9.2 update and continues to occur with watchOS 9.6.1.
Speaking of the Watch Series 8’s LTE feature, I made and received calls via the smartwatch and people on the other end could hear me clearly when I brought the watch close to my face relying on the built-in microphone. The same goes for its speakers to hear people on the other end. However, in a noisy environment, you can always connect the Watch Series 8 to any Bluetooth headset for calls without requiring an iPhone thanks to its LTE connectivity. It also worked when I moved the SIM card from the paired iPhone to another device (as long as it wasn’t connected to the paired iPhone via Bluetooth), but it didn’t work for text messages.
The Apple Watch Series 8 LTE’s ability to let you make/receive calls, send text messages, and compose emails, as well as do a few other things without being connected to an iPhone, makes it a true extension of the iPhone.
Backtracking on the Apple Watch Series 8 worked well, but obviously I haven’t tested its crash detection feature. However, over the months, we have found reports that have proven useful.
My only complaint with the Apple Watch Series 8 after over six months of use is the sleep tracking, which needs significant improvement. I hope this will be fixed in the next update. I’d also like to see Apple introduce afternoon nap tracking.
Drums
The Apple Watch Series 8 Aluminum 41mm (GPS + Cellular) packs a 282mAh battery, advertised to offer 18 hours of battery life on “4 hours of LTE connection and 14 hours of connection to iPhone via Bluetooth” with “90 time controls, 90 notifications, 45 minutes of app use and 60 minutes of training with music playback from Apple Watch via Bluetooth.”
My usage has been relatively more conservative and many times there hasn’t even been 30 minutes of training. However, the Watch Series 8 always had an LTE connection and was also connected to the iPhone 13 via Bluetooth. With this type of usage, the Apple Watch Series 8 got me through the entire workday, but needed a charge before bed as it requires at least 30% battery for sleep tracking.
After the Watch Series 8’s battery was fully discharged, it took just over an hour to go from 100% discharged with the included charger, of which it took the first 9-10 minutes to charge. power on.
Verdict
The Apple Watch Series 8 with cellular connectivity is a nice extension of an iPhone as it allows you to make and receive phone calls, send and receive messages, and do a few other things like check and compose emails without being connected to an iPhone. You can also download music to play offline and listen to it through the Watch’s speakers or Bluetooth earphones without keeping it connected to an iPhone, which could come in handy when you’re going for a run or working out.
The Watch Series 8 has a bright screen that’s readable outdoors under strong sunlight and a sturdy build, which has held up well after more than six months of use. The same goes for bundled straps. The performance of the smartwatch is also snappy and, together with a good haptics, provided a pleasant experience.
However, notification management needs improvement and UI navigation could be improved for a more convenient experience. I’d also like to see Apple release an app that serves as a one-stop solution for all things Apple Watches, eliminating the need for users to juggle three different apps for different purposes.
So, a year later, should you buy the Apple Watch Series 8 or wait for the Watch Series 9? If rumors are to be believed, the Apple Watch Series 9 will not come with any significant upgrades as it is said to be “essentially unchanged” from the Watch Series 8. It is expected to get a new chip based on Apple’s A15 SoC, which could bring improvements in smartwatch performance and efficiency.
Considering this, and if you trust Apple to fix the software issues we’ve talked about with subsequent software updates, I see no reason not to buy it if you find a great deal, which you probably will as soon as we get there. closer to Apple’s September 12 event as retailers would like to liquidate their old stock at discounted prices before the Watch Series 9 arrives.
Apple Watch Series 8
Apple Watch Series 8 Aluminium
Professionals
- Lightweight and comfortable
- Robust construction
- Bright screen with good touch response
- Snappy performance
- Water resistance 50 meters
- Nice tactile sensation
- LTE connectivity is a very convenient feature to have on a smartwatch
Against
- Requires three different apps to use
- Notification management needs to be improved
- Sleep tracking is not accurate
- No monitoring of afternoon nap
- Battery life
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