The Apple Watch Ultra is Apple’s first real attempt at an adventure watch. It has a rugged design, a huge 49-millimeter display, an action button, and a host of outdoor sports features to make the watch feel right at home on the wrist of a runner, hiker, or Ironman. With 60 hours of battery life, it also has the stamina to last – something that has been missing from the best Apple Watches in recent years. The Apple Watch Ultra is easily the best wearable the brand has ever made.
It has a bright, large display, a new customizable physical button that makes it easier to start or stop running workouts, and longer battery life. In a clear attempt to take on Garmin and Polar, Apple has included a lot of useful tech and really helpful features that will really come in handy in a pinch. For the mediocre fitness enthusiast or someone who can afford a slightly better Apple Watch, this is an easy buy. It’s big, a bit clunky, and offers a lot of features that the average person doesn’t need in their day-to-day life.
And at $799, it’s the most expensive watch in the current Apple Watch lineup. After a week of testing, we doesn’t think it’s going to beat out Garmin, Polar or Coros watches for Ironman, thru-hiking or deep sea diving, at least not yet. But it’s really good for weekend warriors and advanced athletes, and very tempting for people who aspire to that status, and for a whole lot of people who just want the biggest, baddest Apple Watch they can get.
Design and Display
The design of the Apple Watch Ultra, unchanged since 2014. The all-new titanium frame was something we were concerned about when we saw render images of it online in the months leading up to launch. In reality, though, it’s quite attractive and we prefer the rugged, metallic design to the slimmer lines of the Apple Watch 8. For starters, it’s a 49mm watch, with the much larger, nearly two-inch display sitting bigger and prouder on the wrist.
If you’re used to the smaller Watch or are upgrading from the Watch 3, the Ultra will feel huge and a bit heavy at first. However, we quickly got used to the extra size and weight, and the tradeoffs are worth it. The Digital Crown and side button on one side of the Watch Ultra have been reinforced a bit. Both are encased in metal to make them sturdier and more resistant to damage if jostled around. The spinning Digital Crown is larger and has larger grooves designed for gloved operation.
Although this element is easier to operate, the oversized crown occasionally rubs against the skin when spinning, which is annoying. The Watch Ultra’s display is slightly raised from the main body of the device, with small plastic strips under the screen at the top and bottom – this adds to the rugged look of the new Watch, but also allows for improved GPS performance through the metal shell.
Features
The Apple Watch Ultra has a skin temperature sensor and fall detection, but there are a bunch of other features that should make the watch even more adventurous. Let’s start with the revamped Compass app, which makes the Apple Watch Ultra a more powerful navigation accessory. It lets you save waypoints or specific markers when you’re in a place you want to mark. There’s also a retrace feature that lets you retrace your steps if you get lost, for example.
Apple has equipped the watch with dual-frequency GPS that integrates L1 and L5 algorithms. This gives the Ultra “the most accurate GPS of any Apple Watch to date,” according to Apple. The Ultra also has clever features like Precision Start, which lets you bypass the 3,2,1 countdown sequence when starting an activity and wait until you know the watch has found a GPS signal. During testing, we were impressed with this feature.
It’s nothing new in the world of Garmin’s best watches, but it makes the Ultra a more reliable watch to wear on your wrist on race day. In addition to all the watchOS 9 features available on watchOS 9 supported devices, the Apple Watch Ultra has an exclusive Wayfinder dial that brings all the outdoor sports complications into a single dial. The entire dial is fully customizable, and when you turn the crown, the dial turns red to help you see in the dark.
Fitness and Health Tracking
While the Apple Watch has always offered a major reason to buy fitness trackers, such as run tracking and activity monitoring, it steps it up a notch with the Watch Ultra. The Watch Ultra now offers better satellite tracking for more accurate running distances, a larger battery for longer runs, better monitoring of transitions between triathlon segments, and a depth sensor that provides information when diving.
The goal is to make the Watch Ultra appealing to those who really want their watch to keep up with their active lifestyle – whether you’re a runner, diver, surfer, hiker or triathlete, Apple wants you to feel like this watch is enough. With that in mind, we strapped on the Watch Ultra for a week and ran various routes with it to see how it compared to other running watches. Garmin and co. have improved their smartwatch features to the point where they’ve become brilliant daily companions, so Apple will have to become a strong fitness competitor to keep up.
One of the big claims Apple is making with the Watch Ultra is that it will offer the best GPS tracking performance in dense, inner-city environments, so we headed to central London to test that theory. Apple has added more frequency bands that should receive better in dense, urban environments. In addition, Apple is using machine learning, data connections and your stride length to better estimate where you are. This is to prevent it from looking like you’re walking through a building or across a lake because your GPS connection is down.
Safety Features
One feature of running watches that most brands put a lot of emphasis on with their GPS watches is the tracking feature, which lets you keep track of the distance you’ve traveled on a small map so you don’t get lost. Oddly, despite having its own maps app, Apple doesn’t do the same, instead relying on a little compass radar to guide you in the right direction. If you’re lost in a city, that’s fine, as you can usually walk around buildings or find an alternate route if you hit a dead end, but when you’re walking, it can be a real pain to remember if the field has an exit or if you should walk around it.
The backtrack feature also needs to be set up you usually have to set a flag or tell the watch that you want to start backtrack for it to work. While a good compass and the ability to find your way home in the right direction are useful for hiking, it’s odd that Apple doesn’t make better use of its map features to make the Watch Ultra a mega navigation device.
Diving
Apple has made a big fuss about the new dive sensor in the Watch Ultra. The new device lets you see how deep you’re diving, how long you’ve been diving, and what the water temperature is. It’s a good feature, right? Well, it kind of is. Much like runners, there is a large group of divers who want a truly integrated, detailed dive computer on their wrist that can show depth warnings, compression alerts, gas mix monitoring, etc.
Currently, Apple offers a feature that activates when you go underwater, telling you only how deep you’ve dived and for how long. While this feature works very well (in the limited 1.75-meter pool we splashed around in for a bit) and shows how deep you’re diving, that’s about it. There’s no detailed “dive” view on the Watch or iPhone when you’ve finished your session – just how deep you dove and for how long.
Battery Life
When all functions are enabled, the Ultra has a battery life of 12 hours. In Apple’s new power saving mode, the Ultra has the same GPS and heart rate features and has a battery life of 15/16 hours. In a new update coming to the watch in the fall, that time span will be extended to 60 hours, as the setting will allow you to reduce the frequency of GPS and heart rate readings.
While that’s great for an Apple Watch, it’s still shorter than many other running watches on the market. The Fenix 7, for example, lasts up to 89 hours in GPS mode (or 122 hours with solar). During testing, we ran a 10-mile run with the watch 100% charged for a total run time of 85 minutes without activating power-saving mode. We finished the run at 91%, which is about right with Apple’s predictions. We will test the battery runtime further in the coming days.
Software
The Apple Watch Ultra runs watchOS 9, which brings a number of features, including advanced sleep monitoring with sleep stages. As with iOS 16, a public beta of watchOS 9 has been available since July, so if you already have an Apple Watch, you may have already downloaded and tried it, which means the Watch Ultra will offer a similar user experience.
However, the Watch Ultra does offer a few extras, including the ability to program the orange action button. This means that you can use this button to start a workout, for example, rather than having to swipe across the screen which is very handy if you have wet hands or it’s raining.
Price and Availability
The Apple Watch Ultra costs $799/ £849/ AU$1,299, and it’s a single model that comes with cellular support. In other words, cellular connectivity is not optional, as it is with the Apple Watch 8, which starts at $399 (AU$649) for the GPS-only version. The Apple Watch Ultra was released on September 23 and is available from Apple and third-party retailers like Amazon. You probably won’t find any Apple Watch deals on this new smartwatch, but if you know how to trade in your Apple Watch, you may be able to get a credit for an older device and use it toward the Apple Watch Ultra.
Final Words
We hope you like this article on Apple Watch Ultra review. The Apple Watch Ultra is the Apple Watch Series 8 on steroids, plus so much more. It’s been beefed up to offer a more rugged device that not only has a tougher case, but a larger one, as well as a larger display, more tactile buttons, and additional buttons. Whether it can compete with Garmin’s Fenix models of extreme sports wearables remains to be seen for now, but if the battery specs hold true and the Watch Ultra performs with the same accuracy as its earlier siblings, it could be the Apple Watch to keep an eye on.
