This year I have jumped on the Public Beta bandwagon and tried all of the new Apple OS other than macOS. I have written a bit about my love of the Apple Watch and how it’s probably one of the main reasons I have never entirely switched to Android (probably time to admit that I am an Apple Fan Girl). So as you can imagine I was pretty keen to start using the watchOS9 and I have been using it for a while now, so here are my initial thoughts of the new feature.
Sleep Tracking:
This is the one that I was most intrigued about. Sleep tracking is nothing new to the Apple Watch but unless you install a third party app such as Sleep Cycle you didn’t get much that how long you were in bed and how many hours you had been asleep. So not all that useful in truth if you really want to understand your sleep.
With watchOS9 you now get a load more information. You be able to see how long you have been in each of the following sleep cycles:
Awake
REM
Core
Deep
As well as the length of time it also tells you the percentage of time you spend in each of these phases of sleep. It doesn’t tell you how you can improve your sleep but at least you have the information to research whether or not you need to address your sleep or not. Of course, for detailed information like the percentage time spent in each phase, you will need to the Apple Health App.
Activity Updates:
This is the thing that I love about the Apple Watch the most. Tracking my activity and exercises, I find that this helps with motivation so it’s always great to see some improvements in this space. You now get more information that you can scroll through on your watch whilst you are exercising, you can scroll through to see how close you are to closing those lovely activity rings.
There has also been the addition of Zones for Cardio activities such as running and cycling. This is great as you can see when you need to push or when you are in the right training zone to get the most out of your training session.
Notifications:
There has been a slight change to how notifications are displayed. A banner will now appear when you are using your watch so it doesn’t take up the whole screen when you get a notification or a message come through.
Notification on the Apple Watch is the best for me after testing a few other smartwatches and this only makes that more the case for me. This is not the biggest of changes but it is a nice one making the UI just that little better in certain situations.
Medications:
I am just starting to try this out and I must admit that it is useful. I am pretty terrible at remembering things so this is a great way for me to get a reminder to take my tablets for the day.
To log the medication you need again go to the health app and under browse, select Medications It is here that you can add your meds. When setting it up you can choose the medication type e.g. tablet and the frequency you take that medication followed by a table icon.
New Watch Faces:
So a new OS means some new watch faces and we have got a few. I am not really one for changing my watch face that often but I did try out a couple of the new faces. I personally liked the metropolitan watch face, it looks pretty smart and has four complications that you can choose from which for me is more than enough.
I did also use the astronomy face as well and although I liked the look of the watch face you can only choose two complications so I didn’t really use it for long at all.
Conclusion:
These are just some things that I have been using on the beta and I do think that they have added something. I already think that this is the best smartwatch for me and these have just added to the enjoyment of using it. I haven’t used all the activity updates E.g. the newly added triathlon activity as I am not a triathlete but I can see that it will be great for a look of people out there.
I have personally enjoyed being able to get more information on my sleep. Sleep is so important so getting more detail is really helpful. I certainly think that all you Apple Watch users out there will be very happy with the new watchOS.