The new Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will begin arriving in stores on Friday. Earlier, select media outlets and YouTube channels shared the first reviews of the watches.
Key new features for both Apple Watch models include brighter displays, a 30% faster S9 chip, a “double tap” gesture for interacting with watches without touching the screen, increased internal storage to 64GB, and more.
Many reviews agree that the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 are serial upgrades, not worthy upgrades from the Series 8 or the original Ultra.
on the edgeVictoria song When upgrading to Series 9 or Ultra 2:
If you have Series 7 or later, you don’t really need to update. For owners of the Series 5 or earlier, it might be worth it, as you get a bigger screen, several new sensors and a processing pump. Series 6 owners are the ones I find most on the fence – and for those people, I mostly encourage upgrades if your battery life isn’t cut short anymore. For those with ultras, seriously. Cool your jets. You get a modular Ultra watchface with watchOS 10, and 3,000 nits versus 2,000 nits doesn’t make a huge difference.
CNBCIn gif death Double tap:
In testing, I didn’t find double-tapping to be an essential everyday gesture for me, but it was fun to play with, and the feedback when it worked was satisfying.
I’m also missing the “smart stack” widget available with a double tap — I don’t like widgets in general, and I don’t usually like widgets, like the card with tips for my new Apple Watch. . The individual widgets are selected by machine learning, so it’s better to use it.
The gesture also requires the Apple Watch interface to enable its backlight. You cannot double tap while your hand is at your side. Instead, you have to first raise your hand to wake up the display, then tap your fingers twice, which makes it feel like a very exaggerated motion.
CNETof Lexy Savvides Apple Watch Ultra 2’s bright display benefits from a flashlight feature with 3,000 nits peak brightness:
But it’s the flashlight that gets a big boost. It can light up a small dark room, light your way when you drop your keys, and even give your kids a spooky glow when you read them a bedtime story. I took the Apple Watch Ultra 2 into a cave, and it lit up the rockface better than the first Ultra when I compared the two.
Mobile syrupPatrick O’Rourke On the S9 chip:
Next, there’s the new S9 chip. With Apple sticking with the S8 chip from the Series 6, a smartwatch app bump is long overdue. I didn’t run into lag issues with the S8, and while the S9 is more powerful, I didn’t notice much of a performance boost in day-to-day use. The S9 chip, on the other hand, powers the Siri implementation on the S9 device, allowing the smartwatch to quickly respond to requests like starting a workout or setting a timer.
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