Just before I start testing the Apple Watch Ultra, I go for a run with a regular Apple Watch. It’s winter and it’s pitch dark, the thermometer reads minus 5. After two kilometers of running, the clock signals that the battery is flat and after 24 kilometers it switches off. Then I’m three kilometers from home and I have to run the last bit without music in my ears and without recording my workout. That wouldn’t have happened with a Watch Ultra, so I won’t have to try it again while I’m testing this watch.
It goes deep
I start the tests by going to the pool and testing the diving functions. The pool here is no more than two meters deep, so there will be no extensive diving, but there will be confirmation that the sensors are working. The Apple Watch Ultra has several sensor upgrades that the regular Apple Watch lacks. There is a water temperature sensor and a depth sensor, which means as soon as I dip my arm into the water, the watch shows the depth and temperature of the water. I try to dive a little and I can very well follow the depth directly on the watch screen. In the pool I also take the opportunity to do a couple of laps in the pool and have the watch measured. I dive into the middle of the pool and it confuses the watch which first gets the wrong measurement and then gets sharper. It is clearly evident that it is the curves at the tip of the pelvis that help the watch measure distance. I embarrass myself and turn around before the tile is counted along its entire length anyway, and especially in water the heart rate measurements become more sporadic because the watch has difficulty measuring in those conditions. For more advanced dives – in the sea rather than the form offered in a pool – the Oceanic Plus app can provide more detailed information and advice and turn your watch into more than a dive computer. So the snorkel mode is free, while the more advanced features and alerts cost SEK 109 per month for the vacationing diver or SEK 979 per year for the more regular diver. The included Appel Deep app is also great for snorkelling, which is what the free part of Oceanic Plus is for.
Not that extreme
My impression of the Watch Ultra after a couple of weeks of testing is that it pretends to be extreme without really being. It’s all about perspective. I certainly don’t see myself as an extreme athlete, but I can still see that the Ultra has a number of advantages over the regular Apple Watch. At the same time, the battery life offered by the Apple Watch Ultra is nothing to brag about when we compare it to watches that lead in that branch.
With the Apple Watch Ultra, I normally get two days of battery life before needing to charge. So I have the e-SIM in the watch so I can get notifications, stream Spotify and send messages even when the phone isn’t on. However, it almost always is. I have the active lock screen turned off and I exercise for about an hour a day with GPS on and measure my sleep with the clock at night. Even with longer and somewhat more extreme training sessions, the watch lasts a day without problems if charged in the morning. With a fully charged watch, the battery drops from 100 to 81 percent after one hour and 20 minutes of operation. Another cycle of Spotify streaming knocks the battery over an hour and 40 minutes from 67 to 40 percent.
Not that embarrassing
Before I start using the Apple Watch Ultra, I’m a little concerned that it’s too bulky and heavy on my arm, but that’s a concern I can quickly dismiss. Sure, the Ultra is a little bigger and heavier. It can actually weigh almost twice as much as an Apple Watch Series 7 with an aluminum case, but it doesn’t cause any discomfort in everyday life or even when I sleep with the watch on. Watches that Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro and Suunto 9 Peak Pro they were both significantly more disruptive in practice than the Apple Watch Ultra. It’s mostly that the watch is rounded at the part that sits against the skin which means it’s still comfortable and doesn’t feel excessive even when I sleep with it on. I also know from experience that the bracelet you use has a very big impact on feel, more than weight actually, so it can also affect the feel of the watch.
One of the first nights I sleep with the clock on, when I wake up in the morning and go to study the sleep report, it states that I had an hour of activity in the middle of the night while I was sleeping, which means I was in standing and moving for at least one minute. It’s not something I can call definitively wrong, but even more unlikely is that he also claims that I took the watch off and then put it back on my arm, because for a full hour it was unable to take any measurements. I strongly believe this is a bug, in the same way that I have sometimes received a message that I have had an hour of standing when just sitting. No watch measures exactly right, and the Apple Watch Ultra is no exception to that rule. The same goes for the GPS, but I still seem to notice fewer deviant recordings there than with other watches, it follows the roads I ran on well. GPS can show errors especially when tall buildings or thick foliage blocks the signals and in some such challenging areas I didn’t run so the differences can be bigger there.
More features
In addition to the durable titanium case, larger screen, improved GPS with two frequencies, the Apple Watch Ultra also has other features that the regular Apple Watch lacks. The two buttons on the right are larger and raised for use with gloves, and you have an extra button on the other side. That button, the trigger button, I reach for first quite often by accident, when I press one of the other buttons and rest my finger on the opposite side. It’s probably mostly a matter of getting used to, because of course it can be avoided. However, once I get the hang of it, I accidentally hit the trigger button just by bending my wrist. You can choose what the button should do and it can be to start a workout, start a dive (since diving is not available as a form of training), start a timer or something else. I chose to start training and after a series of workouts that started by mistake, due to only bending my wrist, I completely deactivated the function. A long press of the button can start the siren, but that too can be turned off if desired.
The e-SIM capability for connecting without a cell phone nearby is included in the Apple Watch Ultra as well as everything we’ve come to expect from an Apple Watch. Thus it combines an everyday watch and an adventure watch in one. For better or worse. This means that we have constant health monitoring with heart rate, pedometer, sleep monitoring and you can pay with Apple Pay, receive notifications and respond with Siri, emails, music, messages, blood oxygen level and so on. Plus access to the App Store with other training apps like Strava, Runkeeper, Ridely for riding, Slopes for skiing and Golf Gamebook as well as Spotify, calendar, podcasts and more. In short, you get everything a standard Apple Watch offers, and more. At a significantly higher price point, which means the Apple Watch Ultra isn’t for everyone.
