Smart Watch Series 9, 41mm GPS, Midnight

After using a Fitbit versa for 4 years, I was ready to try something new. I did a lot of research and found that the apple watch was good for fitness and health tracking, as well as having lots of extra features that many fitness watches don’t have. Here are my thoughts are one week of using the apple watch 9. The band: Because it is more of a mesh material, I was worried about the band staying wet. I get very sweaty during workouts and I like to rinse the watch off after. I found that it took about two hours of wearing it for the band to dry completely after getting wet. Not great, but also not too bad. The charger: The charger uses a USB c connection. This is a bit of a nuisance because it did not come with a wall adapter. The only place I can plug this in is into my laptop. The watch itself: The watch is sleek; I like the screen size and overall look. The watch controls are easy to use, the haptics/gestures are a nice touch. Watch faces: I was disappointed in the selection of watch faces. There are limited options compared to Fitbit/Garmin, and most are analog which is not my preference. I find digital time to be easier to read at a glance. Half of the watch faces were from Nike - I don’t have any interest in being a walking Nike advertisement. Many of the watch faces are very customizable, which is nice, but the big failure here is that there is no option to see your step count on your watch face. I like to be able to see my daily steps at a glance, but it is not possible unless you download yet another app (more on this later). Health Tracking: The first thing I noticed is that the watch is not constantly reading your heart rate. On my Fitbit, I loved to be able to see my steps and my current heart rate at a glance. The apple watch is not constantly reading heart rate, so it says something like “65 BPM - 8 minutes ago”. It is not super useful to me to know what my heart rate was 8 minutes ago. Exercise Tracking: This is where I was really disappointed in the apple watch. One morning, I performed yoga for 15 minutes. I started a yoga activity before the workout, and it counted as 15 exercise minutes. Great. Later that same day I went to play tennis. 90+ minutes of high-intensity physical activity. I forgot to start the exercise on the watch - not too concerning to me because Fitbit recorded cardio exercise automatically. I was dismayed to find at the end of 90 minutes, my total exercise minutes was only 30. 15 from yoga, 15 from tennis. The watch also did not prompt me to start a workout during tennis, which it sometimes does while walking. It seems like with the apple watch, you have to be extra careful to start an exercise - otherwise the fitness tracking will not record correctly at all. Again, I really liked Fitbit, which automatically recorded exercise for me in an accurate way if I forgot to “start workout”. Health Data: The first thing that annoyed me is that your fitness/health data is spread across multiple apps. You have the Health app, the Fitness app, and the Apple Watch app. I don’t like having a ton of apps on my phone, and don’t see any reason why health/fitness couldn’t be wrapped up into the watch app. For me, the watch app should contain all of the data the watch is collecting. Fitbit/Garmin have a single app that make it easy to view data. Sleep tracking: The apple watch does a pretty good job tracking sleep and includes lots of data like heart rate/respiratory rate. My biggest complaint is that it does not tell me what time I fell asleep and what time I woke up like Fitbit did. I also really like that Fitbit gives you a sleep “score”, and I don’t see anything like that for apple. Battery Life: Obviously the battery life on the watch is not nearly as good as Fitbit/Garmin etc. This didn’t really bother me though, I charged it for 15-20 minutes every day while I showered and this was enough to keep it going. After giving the apple watch a try, I decided to return it and go with something more fitness focused. I was disappointed because I had been really excited about the apple watch. It does have a lot of cool features and technologies, and I really liked the detailed health data that was collected. However, I felt that apple fails to present this data in an accessible way. I was also really disappointed by the exercise tracking. The watch is supposed to auto-detect exercise but after 90 minutes of tennis, it recorded only 15 exercise minutes and did not include an entry in the exercise history at all (within the fitness app). If you care mostly about smart watch technology and phone/watch integration, I think the Apple Watch 9 is a good option. But if you are focused on fitness, I would recommend going with another option.