Tag: Smartwatch

14 Cool Things Your Apple Watch Can Do

If you only use your Apple Watch to count steps and read texts, you’re missing out. A powerful, pint-sized computer that lives on your wrist, the device can be used for everything from checking your heart rate to checking out at the grocery store. And, yes, it makes for a sleek, regular-old timepiece, too. 

Whether you own the budget Apple Watch SE or the high-end Apple Watch Ultra 2, the tips below can help you harness the many sensors, built-in tools, and customization options to make the model better meet your needs. 

To access the latest features and user experience, be sure your watch is updated to the most recent version of WatchOS 11.

If you’re still debating which Apple Watch to buy, we have a guide to help you decide. We also highlight a few of the best-rated models at the bottom of this story.  

In our Smartwatch Ratings, available to CR members, we offer the full test results for more than 60 models—scored on metrics like versatility, scratch and water resistance, and the accuracy of the step count and heart rate monitoring. Health and Fitness

Harness your watch’s sensors and features to level up your fitness.Pause Your Rings

You’re no doubt familiar with the three colorful Apple Rings that display your daily progress toward your movement, exercise, and stand goals. If you’re fond of closing those rings to maintain a streak, you can briefly pause and preserve that campaign when you’re sick or traveling long-distance.

In the Fitness app, click on your Rings and scroll down to Pause Rings.

You can also adjust the Ring goals to make them more or less challenging.

In the Fitness app on your phone, tap your profile picture on the top right and select Change Goals.Turn Your Watch into a Hiking Companion 

Within the Maps app, you can view turn-by-turn navigation on thousands of hiking trails, marked with trailheads and data like the route type and elevation changes. Download the map from your phone before you leave home and you can even consult it when you’re far from cell or WiFi service.

In the Maps app on your iPhone, tap on the finder icon and then your picture in the top right. Tap Offline Maps and select the portion of the map you’d like to have available on your watch.

Your Apple Watch can also connect to third-party iOS hiking maps like AllTrails or WorkOutDoors, which have more detailed trail information.

Don’t forget to log your hike as a workout from the beginning, too. That allows you to review detailed workout info, like your mapped route, mileage, elevation change, heart rate, and more.

Set Up a Sleep Schedule

Good sleep is foundational for good health, and your Apple Watch can help you get more hours of quality slumber. As you likely know, if you wear your watch to bed, you can pore over your sleep stats in the Health app the next morning. But you can also create a sleep schedule that alerts you via your watch when it’s time to wind down and get ready for bed. You can change your schedule for weekends and weekdays, too.

You’ll find the Schedule setting within your sleep data in the Health app. And don’t forget to turn on Sleep Focus before bed, so notifications don’t keep you up.Monitor Your Workout Intensity 

Unsure whether to push yourself during today’s workout? Apple’s Training Load feature analyzes the strain you’ve put on your body over the last week, relative to the last 28 days, letting you know if you’ve pushed way above or way below baseline.

To make use of the Training Load feature, you need to log effort scores for your workouts after completing them. (Fortunately, you can add the scores retroactively, too.) Review Training Load data within the Fitness app on your iPhone or watch. Safety

Better protect yourself using these Apple Watch tools.Protect Your Hearing

Repeated, long-term exposure to noise levels at or above 85 decibels can permanently damage your hearing, according to the World Health Organization. Your watch alerts you when ambient noise levels spike, allowing you to take proactive steps to protect yourself.

To change the decibel threshold at which your watch notifies you, go to the Watch app on your phone, select Noise, and then make a selection at Noise Threshold.

If you don’t want to be pinged about high noise levels, you can turn the feature off from the same settings menu. Connect to Emergency Contacts

You can reach your emergency contacts quickly by holding down the side button on your watch and dragging Emergency Call to the right, which will alert both authorities and your designated contacts. The watch can also alert the emergency contacts if it detects a fall.

To set up your emergency contacts, go to the Medical ID section of your phone’s Health app.Shine a Flashlight

When fumbling for your keys in a parking lot after dark or walking around your house late at night, you can turn your watch into a convenient on-wrist flashlight. Just press the side button to open the Control Center and tap the flashlight icon. You can swipe right to change the flashlight’s mode, choosing between a regular, red, or flashing light. To adjust the brightness, turn the digital crown on the side.View Hands-free GPS Navigation 

You can view step-by-step GPS directions on your watch display. This is handy if you need to, say, safely stay off your phone while driving or cycling. Begin navigation via the Maps app on your watch or phone. You can also ask Siri to start navigation on your watch using a voice command.Productivity

Save time and reduce how often you have to fiddle with your phone.Pare Down Notifications 

Given the chance, your watch will buzz day in and day out with all manner of alerts from your phone. To prevent it from becoming a nuisance, you can limit notifications to those you truly want to see. Ideally, this also reduces how often you pick up your phone.

Go to the Watch app on your iPhone, choose Notifications, then toggle off all unwanted apps. To further reduce distractions, turn on Do Not Disturb or Personal modes as needed.Tap to Make Purchases

Like your iPhone, your Apple Watch is equipped with NFC technology that lets you securely make purchases at checkout. You need to have your debit or credit card information stored in your iPhone’s Wallet app. Once that’s set up, you just double-click the side button on your watch and hold the display up to the contactless card reader. A haptic buzzing confirms that the payment went through. You can also review any purchases made with your Apple Watch in the Wallet app.Personalization

Make your watch work better for you by making it your own.Choose Your Favorite Watch Face

Don’t be afraid to show off your style. There are dozens of custom watch face options for the Apple Watch. Some spotlight activity goals, the local weather, or even the lunar cycle. Others look like a traditional analog watch. Tap and hold down your display and scroll to the right until you see “New” with a plus symbol. From there, you can browse Apple’s options and add ones you like to your personal collection.Swap Out the Complications

The tools and apps displayed on your main watch face—aka the complications—are easy to swap out. Just hold your finger down on the display until you enter editing mode. From there, you can choose between dozens of complications—like the weather, your day’s schedule, the watch’s battery percentage, or your text alerts. These easy-access apps spare you from tapping around on your watch more than necessary.Scale Up Text Size

Struggling to make out the tiny text on the display? Press the side button on your watch to open the Control Center. Then select Aa and scroll to select the text size that works for you. You can make other changes to your watch’s appearance, too. From the Accessibility section in Settings, you can increase the color contrast, change the color filters, adjust the minimum brightness of your display in low-light conditions, and more.Make the Vibration More Prominent

If you don’t notice the buzz on your wrist, you can make the vibration stronger. Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics, and select Prominent haptics. Keep in mind that a stronger vibration can drain the battery faster.

There’s Finally a Decent Smartwatch for Android

IIswitched from an iPhone to the Google Pixel 2 a few years ago after thinking about the move for a long time. My Apple Watch had held me back. The watch is an expensive device, but it would be rendered a paperweight if I used a Pixel full time, because Apple doesn’t allow it to work with Android phones. There were few alternative watches that would work with my Pixel — or at least few that seemed at all appealing.

Ultimately, I still decided to change over to a Pixel, which had become compelling enough despite the lack of Apple Watch support, and gave up wearing a smartwatch altogether.

But now I’ve finally found a smartwatch I’m willing to wear again, from an unexpected source: Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active2. Awful naming aside, it’s one of the strongest competitors to the Apple Watch I’ve seen.

Companies like Fossil and Misfit make wearables that run Google’s Wear OS, while FitBit and Withings churn out smartwatches focused on fitness or aesthetics. For the most part, smartwatches like the TicWatch look decent online, but are thick and chunky to wear in real life. They feel more like knock-off spy watches than accessories. Worse still, Wear OS devices are notorious for poor battery life and aren’t likely to get updates for the long haul — manufacturers don’t make money from keeping the software up to date, so they simply ignore it.

Samsung’s Active2, though, works with any device, looks great, and can make it almost two days on a single charge (not bad, given Apple targets 18 hours of battery life with its Series 5 watch).

What’s most surprising about the Active2 is an attention to detail that’s rare.

The difference starts with its appearance. I have wanted a circular smartwatch ever since the Moto 360 debuted and ultimately disappointed back in 2014; the shape looks natural for a watch. The Samsung’s Active2 is also slim enough to hide under a shirt or sweater, and small enough that it doesn’t seem like a smartwatch at all. The always-on display, especially with circular analog watch faces, helps it blend in even better.

What’s most surprising about the Active2 is an attention to detail that’s rare. The edges of its round display, for instance, can be used as a way to scroll through the UI—dragging your finger around the edge to the right scrolls down, and to the left scrolls up. While the bezel doesn’t physically move as it does in previous generations of Samsung smartwatches, it understands touch, and it’s more intuitive as a way to interact with a watch.

Many of the watch’s other features take advantage of the round display. The “My Day” watch face, for example, places reminders of the day’s meetings around the edges of the display, which is a helpful way to see what’s coming up for the entire day without jumping into an app.

Though not specifically targeted at fitness tracking like some of its competitors, the Active2 delivers on health features as well. While many watches require you to manually specify when a workout has begun, the Active2 automatically logs workouts, so that you don’t need to explicitly indicate you’re out for a run or cycle. After 10 minutes of activity, a little vibration notifies you the workout has started — which is so much better than fidgeting around with menus to get a workout kicked off.

Active2 has other thoughtful fitness prompts, clearly inspired by the Apple Watch, like a “heart” that fills up (similar to the Apple Watch’s rings) as you exercise and go about your day. But the Active2’s prompts go even further than Apple Watch’s prompts: Rather than pushing you to simply stand up hourly, the Active2 detects and shows inactivity, prompting a short walk or stretch.

I tested the Bluetooth version of the Active2, but I’m thinking of returning it for a refund so I can buy the LTE version, which would allow me to stream music, as well as get calls and notifications on the go.

What I most want from my smartwatch is the option to leave my phone at home entirely while I go for a run or cycle — or even just to escape scrolling through social media for a while — and Samsung might be the first brand to truly pull it off. The Apple Watch only allows Apple Music to sync offline. With the Active2, you can sync the device to Bluetooth headphones directly and use a Spotify integration to play play music offline while still doing GPS tracking on a run with the Strava watch app, finally free of wires.

I had worried that the Active2’s battery life wouldn’t be good enough. For the last two years, I’ve worn a Withings Steel HR, which only needs charging once every month. The Apple Watch I wore before that needed to be charged much more frequently — about once every two days — and I rarely remembered to charge it before the battery died.

Despite my fears, I was delighted by the Bluetooth Active2: Every night after a full day’s use — including workout tracking — I dropped it onto the magnetic charger with a solid 60% of battery life leftover.

Samsung didn’t get everything right with the Active2. One of the biggest pain points is its app store. Samsung has its own entire ecosystem of apps, if you’re noton a Samsung phone like the Note 10, you need to install three separate apps to even get started with the watch. That’s notincluding the Samsung Health app, which you’ll also need if you want health data on your phone andthe third-party syncing app for Google Fit if you want your data in there instead of Samsung’s silo.

Unlike the Apple Watch, Active2 allows third-party watch faces, but almost all of them are terrible. And its app store does a terrible job of showcasing watch faces that aren’t hideous. Instead, it shows a giant list of poor quality designs before you eventually find a good one buried at the bottom. That’s a shame, really, because the included watch faces are really good— they show off interesting ways to take advantage of the display, and I found myself wanting even more.

The Active2 has other minor quirks, like coming with always-on display disabled by default and burying the setting to turn it on yourself deep in a menu. Samsung did the same with the setting for the bezel-scrolling feature, which is also disabled out of the box.

Then there’s Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant. Settings need to be disabled in multiple places to avoid accidentally triggering it on the watch. And Samsung wouldn’t let me use a different, more capable assistant, like Alexa or Google Assistant. I found myself even wishing Siriwas on this watch, something that I’ve never wanted any other time in the past — Bixby is that bad.

But, amongst all of these quirks and annoyances, the Active2 is surprisingly delightful. It delivers a good smartwatch alternative for anyone who is notdeeply invested in the Apple ecosystem (it works with an iPhone too, but has limited functionality due to Apple restrictions), at a fraction of the price — and with great aesthetics on top. I went in with low expectations, but was delighted to find myself enjoying wearing a smartwatch again.

If you’re in the market for a watch that isn’tthe Apple Watch, the Galaxy Active2 is what you should get. Samsung has delivered something for everyone, and the quality is at the level you’d actually wantto wear on your wrist, rather than hide it up to your sleeve.