The Apple Watch Ultra is truly peak Apple Watch — but even after we pushed it to two days of battery life, we still had to ask ourselves “When are we going to charge this thing?”
to make - although it says it's been years in the making. With a new, more rugged design, better screen and better GPS tracking, it's the first design change in eight years... but it's also incredibly expensive at $799 / £849 / AU$1229.
Even the cellular functionality on board is a comfort - safe in the knowledge that if you're ever in distress you're never going to be alone. If Apple had managed to alter the screen technology somehow to have a truly low-power mode when not in use, and managed to get the Watch Ultra battery life up to around a week, this would probably be a five star device, even for the high cost.
But if you’ve decided that your life needs to be both super active and hyper-connected, then get ready: the Watch Ultra price is set at. The good news is that there are no variants of this model - you choose the band, pay that price and that’s it. We tested the Watch Ultra with the yellow Oceanic Band - and we can’t say we love it. It looks a bit, well, Lego in its design, although it’s sturdy as heck and designed to stay put in ‘high speed watersports’. Well, if a gentle swim in the slow lane of the pool counts… then we can say that’s true.
Right, let’s get onto the good bit: talking about this hulking great upgrade to the Watch design that’s been the same since 2014. The all-new titanium frame was something that worried us when we started seeing renders of it appear online in the months leading up to launch, but in reality it's quite attractive and we prefer the rugged, metallic stylings to the sleeker lines of the Apple Watch 8.
The Watch Ultra display is raised a small amount from the main body of device, with small plastic strips under the screen at the top and bottom - this adds to the rugged look of the new Watch, but it also allows for improved GPS performance through the metallic shell.button - the Action Button to be precise. This is designed to be a place to start runs, activate workouts, turn on the torch... it's customizable and also allows for more precise starting and stopping of a workout too.
The same side as the Action Button houses the all-new speaker and microphone holes - the sound that emanates from the Watch Ultra is 40% louder than on the Watch 8, and there are now three beam-forming microphones, which means they'll adjust to remove noise and take the sound from the best-performing microphone when making phone calls.
In terms of the display, Apple has boosted the peak brightness of the Watch Ultra's screen to 2000 nits - this means it's twice as bright as the Watch 8 and it really shows. One of the features Apple showed off during launch was the ability to spin the Digital Crown on the home screen and go into a cool black and red version of the watch face. Sadly, this is only in the Wayfinder face that's exclusive to the Watch Ultra - it's nice, but it's a shame that it's not across all faces.Diving addition needs more work
With this in mind, we strapped the Watch Ultra on for a week and took it for a variety of runs to see how it performed compared to the dedicated running watches - the likes of Garmin have been improving their smartwatch capabilities to the point that they’re brilliant daily companions so Apple needs to become a fierce fitness rival to compete.
After a four-and-a-bit mile run haring around one of the world’s most densely-populated capital cities, the Apple Watch Ultra and Fenix started to spread apart, the Garmin triggering new lap alerts sooner than the new Ultra. The Fenix 7X just threw a wobbly and didn’t pick us up for a few dozen meters, adding a fair amount of distance onto the run. While both were accurate enough for an inner-city run, we’d always default to the Watch Ultra if going for a fast time through a dense, built-up area or with plenty of tree coverage.
Speaking of Apple’s elevation to a ‘proper’ running watch, the addition of interval training is a big deal: you can now set up a session where you’ll divide it into a number of quicker and slower sections, so you’ll know you need to push for a set amount of time before getting a recovery. Given the easy connection between the Apple Watch and a set of AirPods, which connect seamlessly and will provide audio feedback during your workout, this would have been a nice upgrade to see.
Back to the longer run: we were using the new ‘virtual pacer’ function here, where you add in a distance and a preferred time or pace, and the Watch Ultra will tell you how far ahead or behind of this ghostly other runner you are. It’s something we’ve seen on other devices for a while and it can be hugely motivating - while it’s taken too long to come to the Apple Watch for our taste, it’s a great feature to finally see.
But given the extended battery life of the Ultra, you’ll find yourself pushing a little bit harder to close your fitness rings - burning calories, minutes exercised and standing regularly - nd you can do that through a number of workouts. Sadly, it’s not much better at tracking our exploits in the pool. A five-length swim, punctuated by a couple of stops of over 10 seconds, didn’t track properly, coming up as just two lengths, despite noticing how far we were swimming .
There’s no detailed ‘dive’ view on the Watch or iPhone when you’ve finished your session - just how deep you went and for how long. So that means the same things we liked about the Watch 8, such as monitoring ambient conditions for excess or increased volume and reminding you to protect your ear health, are present and correct, and a great reason to invest in the Apple ecosystem.
Anyone will be able to track their temperature too - so you can see the effects of alcohol ingestion or jet lag. However, it won’t be until other apps can start to make better use of this data will it be a useful sensor - right now, it’s only useful if you’re trying to plan a family and want to spot when you ovulated or you’re just wondering how thick your duvet really is.
While a good compass and the ability to find your way home in the right direction is useful for hiking, it's odd that Apple isn't making better use of its mapping capabilities to make the Watch Ultra a mega navigation beast. One thing we think is often overlooked is cellular connectivity - when it first emerged on the Apple Watch, many networks didn't support it, but yours probably does now.
That means that you'll easily get a couple of harder or longer workouts in before needing to reach for the charger - and that's going to feel like eons for any regular Watch users. We did spot that things descended a bit quicker during our inner-city run, losing 16% of battery life over the 35 minute jog, which makes us suspect that Apple is dynamically choosing the GPS systems to use - rather than having the high-power multiband system constantly going, it'll kick in when more dense environments are sensed.
You'll be able to charge the Watch Ultra up pretty quickly, getting well over 70% of charge in around an hour, but it's when you'll be able to do that charging that matters.
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