Apple announced the next-generation Watch Series 9 in September, and it’s probably the smallest update Apple has ever released. I understand that Apple doesn’t expect users to upgrade their device every year, but when the product highlights are the smartwatch’s carbon neutrality and double-tap gesture, it almost feels like Apple is selling an old model as new.
When I purchased the Apple Watch, I was initially amazed by its design, user interface and features, even overwhelmed. Everything looked so bright, smooth and colorful, as if it had been touched by Apple’s proverbial magic.
But once I got past the honeymoon phase, I realized that the user experience was poor. The core features of the watch are scattered across many apps, with poor feature implementation and the sheer stupidity of seemingly smart features. And that’s before we get to the terrible battery life.
The Apple Watch Series 9, in my experience, is nothing more than a shiny piece of junk. Let me tell you why.
Design and build
But first, let’s take a look at the hardware you’ll strap onto your wrist. That facade is truly something to behold. Apple is known for its mastery of hardware, and the Apple Watch is a fine example.
The Watch 9 is available in two sizes: 41mm and 45mm, and you start by choosing one of the two models. So you can choose between the aluminum and stainless steel versions. Then, select the band package. And finally, you can choose between GPS or GPS + eSIM functionality.
I have the Apple Watch Series 9 45mm Aluminum with GPS, the black one with the Sport Loop fabric strap.
And even though it’s one of the cheaper options on the menu, it still feels pretty luxurious. The nearly bezel-less screen is immediately stunning, plus its Retina 326ppi is sharp enough for a smartwatch.
The screen is covered in slightly curved tempered glass. The frame is made of aluminum with a matte finish (pictured) or stainless steel with a glossy finish.
The speaker is located on the left side, while the digital crown and side button are on the right side. You can swap the orientation of the watch, of course.
The digital crown has been a signature control on these watches and works flawlessly and the tactile feedback is among the best I’ve experienced. In fact, this applies to the entire haptic feedback on the watch.
The bottom of the watch is a combination of ceramic and sapphire glass and contains all the sensors.
I got the Sport Loop strap, which felt a little cheap at first, but I can only applaud its durability. Apple has indeed created something that lasts. He’s been through a lot, and yet, two months later, he looks new.
The Apple Watch Series 9 is resistant to water, dust and even swimming. Overall, it offers a solid build and unique design and we can agree that it is flagship-grade and well-executed.
Hardware
Apple Watch Series 9 is based on a new S9 system-in-package (SiP) with 60% more transistors than the outgoing S8 series chip. It boasts a 30% faster GPU and a new 4-core NPU. This will obviously speed up the OS with faster animations and is claimed to offer 18 hours of all-day battery life – Apple’s wording, not mine. I recognize the snappier interface and interactions; there are no two ways about it.
The biggest advantage of this new S9 SiP is that it allows you to process Siri requests on the device. This means much faster results since they don’t go to the cloud and back. Apple also promises 25% more accurate voice dictation. Oh, and Siri now has access to your health data, making it easier than ever to monitor your key metrics. But as someone who isn’t in the habit of giving voice commands to my watch, I find this update totally useless.
The S9 also allows for the new Double Tap gesture. This is the much-hyped new pinching gesture, where you double-tap while meeting your thumb and forefinger in the air. It works by detecting changes in blood flow and wrist movement via accelerometer and gyroscope sensors. Double-tapping lets you play/pause music, snooze alarms, cycle through widgets, and answer or end calls.
The software should learn how you use this gesture and allow it to be used even more widely.
As for sensors, the Apple Watch has them all: blood oxygen, electric heart sensor with ECG, optical heart sensor with high and low heart rate plus irregular rhythm detection, sleep monitoring, temperature detection, compass, altimeter , accelerometer, gyroscope, ambient light.
There’s also Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, GPS and NFC support, as well as the 4G LTE option via eSIM.
The Watch 9 also gets a new UWB chip, which improves location tracking. You can still locate and ping your paired iPhone with even better accuracy. You also get better integration with HomePod speakers.
Indeed, there’s a lot of technology inside the Watch Series 9. If only they came together to deliver the smooth experience I was hoping for.
Software
Apple Watch is the most popular smartwatch in the world. Some might even call it the best smartwatch around. So what went wrong? Well, it comes down to two things: software and battery life.
The Apple Watch Series 9 has at its disposal the best technology on the market and it is natural that Apple wants you to know it as the best smartwatch. But, after two months with it, I can conclude that this is probably the dumbest of the mainstream smartwatches currently available on the market.
Basically, the Apple Watch is a jack of all trades and master of none.
First, connect and set up your new watch from the Watch app on iPhone. From here you can configure notifications, app behavior, and various settings, as well as customize watch faces.
The Apple Watch operating system has come a long way since the first version and now there are many watch faces. Most of them are quite simple, others are super advanced. Half of the available watch faces support complications: there are spots for small widgets that show real-time information like weather, calendar, moon phase, date, etc.
Options and dials
Unfortunately, although there are many watch faces, most of them are boring or childish. Some are absolutely ugly and unusable, while others are beautiful and yet simply too simple; you can’t even add a date since they don’t support any complications on purpose.
Look at the faces and the complications
Believe it or not, I spent three hours customizing this seemingly perfect dial below and still ended up with something that’s okay at best. And this is my Strike 1! The Apple Watch doesn’t support third-party watch faces yet!
The Apple Watch Series 9 launches the latest watchOS 10. It offers a revamped app look, new watch faces (Snoopy, Palette), new advanced modes like cycling and hiking, and updated health features to include mental and vision health.
I’ll give it to Apple; they know how to create beautiful app interfaces, and all the system apps, such as World Clock, Weather, Fitness, Maps, Mail, Calculator, Phone, Messages, etc., look great and are optimized for use with l ‘clock.
watchOS 10 user interface
Pressing the Digital Crown will bring up the list of apps. It can be a list, but the default view is a grid, which is pretty smart. You can navigate with the crown or with touch.
Control Center and Notification Center are available and are like mini versions of the iOS ones.
And a swipe across the watch face will reveal your big widgets.
Apple Watch has a dedicated App Store with mini versions of popular apps.
And these are the basics.
Now let’s talk about the inferior user experience.
Imagine that – the world’s most advanced smartwatch can’t easily show numerical step count and only restores graphical rings. Strike 2!
I’m used to checking the numerical step count and I find this omission rather annoying. Having to go to another app and then scroll through a few things to see your step count is far from user-friendly.
Furthermore, I also find the supposedly automatic smart features rather stupid.
Let’s start with sleep. Would you imagine that the Apple Watch doesn’t have automatic sleep detection unlike other companies’ $30 sports bands? Instead, you need to set up a sleep schedule; this is the only time of day that the Apple Watch will try to detect your sleep.
What happens if you take a nap in the afternoon? I’ll tell you why: the watch will start objecting and vibrating, prompting you to move more, get up, breathe and drink some water, enough to wake you up.
I eventually turned off smart reminders like these and firmly believe that no one should be forced to sleep on a fixed schedule just to enjoy sleep tracking.
This lazy implementation of sleep tracking is my Strike 3 for Apple Watch! But wait, there’s more.
At this time I was already starting to give up on the Apple Watch, but being a tech reviewer, I managed to cope. And then I came across inadequate sports tracking.
Sleep monitoring
I’ve found that automatic sport detection only works sometimes. And then the sports modes are also fake: they all show calories, heart rate and elapsed time but nothing specific to sports. Jumping rope: no rope counting, boxing: no punch counting. Here is Strike 4. I’ve seen bands and watches in the sub-$100 price range that offer more adequate stats.
Sports
The only well-implemented modes are advanced ones like swimming, hiking, running, and cycling: they use location data and can record and display various other metrics as well.
Individual apps for using sensors like blood oxygen, heart rate, and ECG show accurate information, and the watch will offer suggestions and even check for abnormal heart rates.
But information about these vital elements is scattered in different places, and Apple doesn’t make it convenient to check everything that might interest you in one go. The Health app on the iPhone has also become overcrowded and information is scattered.
Finally we come to communications and notification responses, the things of utmost importance, at least to me. Notifications display well and Bluetooth calls sound quite good. There are canned keyboard responses available, and you can quickly send a thumbs up.
Notifications
But the keyboard, still new for these watches, is only available in a few languages, so if you don’t use English, German, Spanish, Dutch or French, you’re out of luck. If you try to use the English keyboard to type in another language, you’ll have to fight against the built-in autocorrect and swipe gestures. This makes text entry feel like an incomplete feature – adding multiple languages isn’t rocket science – why limit it to just five? And that counts as my Strike 5.
Answers and keyboard
I’ve used other watches, Huawei, for example, and while it had dumber two-way communication, it was smarter in every other way. There was no need to wait for me to tell him when it was time to sleep or work out.
Now let’s talk about the double-tap feature, which was supposed to be the highlight of the Series 9. Apple added it a good month and a half after release and I wish I could say it was worth the wait.
What made the wait worse for me was the fact that double-tap was already available on previous Apple Watch models under Accessibility. Apple just removed that feature from the Accessibility closet, slapped a Smart label on it, and created a new master watch feature.
For what it’s worth, it works well, but I didn’t enjoy using it because it’s slow. And I won’t even bother considering it a strike.
Battery life
And finally we come to the battery life, which is ridiculously poor. It has to be the worst thing about the Apple Watch. It should be clue enough that Apple advertises the watch for this all day 18 hours battery life. You know, there are 24 hours in a day, Apple! It’s as if Apple themselves don’t want you to track your sleep, and that’s why they made it a nightmare to use. You can’t even use sleep tracking if your battery is below 35%!
In an effort to extend battery life I had to scale back some of the watch’s smart features. I turned off heart rate monitoring every minute and some other things like harmful noise detection. So, with the always-on display disabled, 1 hour of training, about 30 time checks and 30 notification checks, a night of sleep tracking, and a few thumbs ups on messages, I actually logged 40 hours of battery life. So far so good. But to get this far, I had to turn off many of the wearable’s smart features, including all-day health tracking (leaving it on only for workouts and sleep). 40 hours of battery life with a bunch of tracking features disabled doesn’t seem like that much.
If you use GPS, take calls on the watch, and engage more with texting and health features, the Watch Series 9 won’t even last a day, maybe 12-14 hours at most. And that’s with the AOD turned off. And that’s definitely worth a sixth shot!
Despite all this, the Watch 9 charges quickly: 15 minutes on the charger will fill around 50% of the battery, while a full charge (from around 10% of the battery) takes around 50-60 minutes.
Verdict
Good morning, breathe, drink water, breathe, get up, slow down, run, breathe, go to bed. It seems Apple thought I needed a wearable to remind me to live. Are we already there?
The joke is really my fault, since I bought this watch out of my own pocket. And the new Apple Watch is not worth buying. There’s no Apple magic here: just a simple cash grab for half-baked technology. This is the most expensive and most popular smartwatch, but I found it as dumb as the first one, which I reviewed eight years ago.
There are too many apps and too many features scattered within them: ECG, noise detection, activity, body oxygen, cycle, reminders, maps, mail, double tap, widgets, iPhone controls, medications, Memoji, shortcuts, mindfulness, photos, remote , Calculator, Flashlight… I also found many sports modes too simple for their own good. I ultimately gave up on most features due to battery considerations or simply because I found them too annoying.
I hated the first Apple Watch for its battery life eight years ago, and now I hate this one even more because it was the same inadequate and inconvenient device. As I said – a jack of all trades, master of none.
It may have been built with the utmost attention to detail; it may have had the best user interface designers in the world and may contain the most advanced chip and sensors and one of the brightest and smoothest displays. Yet its shortcomings are not worth putting up with. Trust me; I have used smart watches from most other brands. Save your time, nerves, and energy and go get a Xiaomi, or Amazfit, or Huawei, or Garmin, or anything else, really. Your wallet will thank you too.
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