With GPS and water resistant rating, the Apple Watch Series 2 is a better fit as an exercise watch

WE have taken the Apple Watch 2 running the distance of a marathon and swum up and down the pool for 2km. This is how it went.

THERE is a sure sign the Apple Watch has just got a lot better. For the first time since the Apple Watch was launched, I’m only wearing one watch.

There has been a lot of changes to the Apple Watch since Tim Cook first unveiled it with the distinctive wheel of apps and the ability to send your heart rate to anyone else wearing an Apple Watch.

The problem with the design version was that those apps took an age to open from the wheel and some of the features, included the heart rate message, were a bit of a novelty whose shine wore off quickly.

There were enough features to keep me wearing it every day, including an activity tracker with the three wheels of standing, 30 minutes of exercise and calorie burn. But it had enough limitations that the Apple Watch was on my left wrist and a Garmin sports watch was on my right.

With Apple Watch Series 2, Apple has not only made the Watch a whole lot better, they have also changed the focus.

From the start, the Watch was about exercise. But now it’s truly an exercise Watch. In the past four days, I’ve worn it running the equivalent distance of a marathon and swum 2km in a pool and its performance has been impressive.

SPEED OF THE APPS

The first thing you notice about the Watch is speed. You hit a button to open an app and they open. Just like that. No more standing staring at your Watch screen or giving up and reaching for your iPhone.

Part of that extra speed is because of the hardware change. On the outside, the Watch looks the same. Inside there is a new dual-core processor that is up to 50 per cent faster. But part of it is also due to the new operating system, WatchOS 3.

The software, which is also available today for existing Apple Watch owners, makes it easier to open apps quickly.

When the Watch was first launched, the side button was used to open a circle of contacts.

Now the side button takes you to a dock of open apps — like double tapping on the home button of your iPhone _ and you can control which apps are in your dock and rearrange the order.

The Apple Watch Series 2.

Apps kept in the dock or in complications on your watch face are kept in the memory so that they launch instantly.

You can now change watch faces just by sliding left or right on the screen, or through the Watch app on your iPhone, where you can also see which apps support complications for each watch face. Starting a run on the old Watch was the rather slow process of opening the app wheel, hitting on the icon (something which is not always easy with clumsy fingers) and waiting for it to open. Now I hit on the exercise icon that is a complication on my preferred watch face and it opens straight away.

PHYSICAL CHANGES

Put the Watch Series 2 next to a Watch Series 1 and you won’t notice much difference but there are major changes you don’t see in a glance. It is water resistant, it has GPS, it has a brighter screen and there are changes across the range, most notably being the Apple Watch Edition where instead of being super expensive gold watches there is now a rather expensive white ceramic watch.

There are new watch faces, but not that many and no third party ones as yet. You can share your activities, if you want to let your trainer know you did the workout as promised or you just like to brag.

You still need to charge the Watch overnight, which means while it’s great as an activity tracker it still is not the best choice to track your sleep.

RUNNING

There were limitations to the Apple Watch Series 1 as an exercise watch, first of which was that it wasn’t something you could wear swimming or during other water sports.

As a running watch, it also had specific limitations because rather than having its own GPS it relied on the GPS in the iPhone. That was fine for basic information on distance travelled and overall speed of a completed run, but the information on your running pace at a particular moment was not accurate.

To a casual runner, that’s not a big deal. To someone trying to stick with a particular pace in a race, that was a big deal.

So, what’s the Watch Series 2 like?

It has GPS (and GLONASS, the Russian GPS system), which makes it more of a complete running watch. A sensible change is using the digital crown and button on the side to pause the watch mid-run or stop the clock at the end, rather than rely on sweaty fingers on the Watch face touchscreen. The format of displayed information has been altered so that you now get a screen of four metrics (time, pace, heartrate, and distance) which is an improvement.

The Apple Watch Series 2 has GPS.

Button controls are useful with sweaty hands.

Before any fun run, you’ll see a bunch of runners all put their arms in the air. They haven’t just realised they need to wee before doing a half-marathon. Well, they probably have but the arms in the air are not that. They are trying to get a GPS signal on their running watch and that can take anything from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the model of the watch and the surroundings.

In a very Apple move, you can’t actually tell if your Apple Watch has connected to a GPS satellite. You just have to trust that it has.

The secret, Apple says, is that the Watch uses a combination of locally stored satellite data and the surround wi-fi networks to know your location even before you open the exercise app. So when you press the three-second countdown, it already knows where the GPS should be.

It seems to work quickly as Apple promises, although given there is no icon showing GPS strength, it would be hard to notice if it wasn’t working.

BATTERY LIFE

The big concern with putting a GPS into the Apple Watch was the impact it would have on battery life. GPS is a big battery killer.

For me, that question was answered on Sunday — the traditional day for a runner’s weekly long run. I ran 3 hours 30 minutes with GPS on and then later in the day had GPS on again for another 30 minutes when I took the dog for a walk. At the end of a fairly long day, my Watch was still showing 40 per cent battery life.

Apple says you can expect about five hours of battery life running GPS, which means your typical marathon runner will get to the finish line before their watch finishes but you might want to think about using GPS on your Watch to track your long day hike.

One of the challenges with assessing the capabilities of the Apple Watch is that third-party apps could add extra functionality that are not obvious now.

Apple is opening up its sensors to app developers so that they will be able to use the GPS, accelerometer and heartrate sensors.

One functionality that apps won’t be adding is extending the battery life of the Watch by having it check for GPS signals less frequently, for activities like hiking where your position does not change as quickly as running and pace is not as crucial. Apple says that’s not possible, at least for now.

WISH LIST

An improvement that could come to the Watch through a third-party app would be the ability to program your own interval session, and then run to that program. At the moment, you can mark your own intervals during a run by double tapping the screen but it would be good if you set up an interval routine with legs defined by distance and pace and have the Watch prompt you to the next interval — something like a beep to tell you that you have just run 500m at 4:30 pace and you now can do a slow jog for 100m before picking it up again. Until the Watch gets that functionality, I’ll be wearing a Garmin as well at least one day a week.

There are analytics that dedicated running watches do that the Apple Watch doesn’t at this stage but conceivably that could come through third-party apps.

The Apple Watch Series 2 is faster and has an acceptable battery life.

It would be great if at the end of a run with the Apple Watch I could see the elevation of my route, my heartrate throughout the run my cadence.

I would also like to see a third-party running app use the heart rate sensor to indicate what heart

rate zone I am in during exercise. Again, that’s not available yet.

It’s frustrating too that the native exercise app tracks swimming, running and cycling but there is no triathlon mode that would like you cycle through the three, and transitions, with a button click.

The exercise app will show you your pace for 1km intervals during your run, and when your run is over you can open the activities app on your iPhone and click on a run (or other activities such as a cycle or open water swim) to see interval splits, average heart rate and a route of your run with colour coding indicating your fastest part of your run.

SWIMMING

The Apple Watch Series 2 is water resistant to 50m, which makes it suitable for swimming. Not diving to the depths of the sea swimming, but ocean swimming and lap pool swimming.

This week at swim squad, I started off by hitting the native workout app and selected Pool Swim, selected the length of the pool and was good to go. During a swim, the touch screen is locked so the impact of the water on the screen doesn’t activate it. To pause the watch, you hit the two buttons on the side and the speaker ejects water at the end.

Why would you want to wear a watch while swimming laps? It counts laps, distance and average pace with the smarts to detect your stroke type and measure calorie count. For the first time in wearing an Apple Watch for more than a year, I was able to track the calories I burnt swimming laps on my Apple Watch and have it complete my calorie burn circle — because it’s waterproof, it’s now an activity tracker that will track all of my exercise.

Apple Watch Series 2 water resistant 50 metres. Picture: Apple

Previously, not only could I not wear the Apple Watch swimming but I could not manually add an exercise I did without the Apple Watch to earn credit on the three-ring activity display.

At the end of the swim the Activity app showed the distance I had swum, my split times and calorie burn. It also showed an average heartrate, which is surprising given wrist-based heart rate is notoriously difficult to measure underwater. It would be interesting in further testing to wear a waterproof heart rate strap paired with another device and compare the results against the Apple Watch.

If you’re going to be in water but not doing an exercise you want to track through the app, slide up from the bottom of the Watch to get to a control panel where you can put it in swim mode. That locks the screen and, when you’re away from the water, you then turn the Digital Crown to unlock the screen instructs the speaker to issue a series of beeps to emit water.

EXTRAS

There are a few other new features in WatchOS 3, including apps for Find My Friends and Reminders and an SOS feature that will call the emergency services number in whatever country you’re in by pressing and holding the side button (you do have to touch on the SOS icon to confirm it’s not an accidental knock of the button).

WatchOS 3 brings the Breathe app, based on the field of research proving the biological benefits, including genetic changes, of mind-body medicine.

The Breathe app prompts you to focus on your breathing and gives you feedback on your heart rate at the end.

The first time I got the prompt on my wrist to do slow breathing, I got excited _ which is the exact opposite reaction to what slow breathing is supposed to do.

I’m not sure that slow breathing is going to change my life but it does feel good to take a moment to relax.

White ceramic is now the top-end Apple Watch.

OVERVIEW

Apple has managed to keep the Watch looking the same as the first version but significantly upgrade it, particularly with the water resistance rating and GPS.

This is now a much better exercise watch. But the question remains is where it will sit in the market of exercise watches.

Those training for their next Ironman are likely to stick with their dedicated sports watches from the likes of Suunto, Polar and Garmin. And those wanting just a basic activity tracker will find this offers too much, and be out of their price range.

But there is lots of space in the middle and Apple is targeting that space. This is now a smart watch that is smart enough to be a better running watch and smart enough to track more of the activities you do and in a more accurate way.

With the first generation of Apple Watch, I would put it on after a triathlon and be told I had not done any exercise that day. Typically, I responded in a mature fashion by yelling at the Watch “no, it’s you who hasn’t done any exercise”.

The Apple Watch is quicker and has GPS and the water resistance rating it needs to be more effective as a sports watch.

Now we have to wait and see what app developers can do to take the Apple Watch Series 2 to the next level.

Apple Watch Series 2 / 4/5 / apple.com/au

Apple Watch Series 2 starts at A$529. Available on Friday.

Originally published as With GPS and water resistant rating, the Apple Watch Series 2 is a better fit as an exercise watch