Getting a workout on a fitness watch: The Ultra Proximity 399Mota X-ray Charger for Outdoors
I didn’t like how big the Ultra was on my wrist. This watch is large, thick and it stands out. Though I thought it would be light, it is not the kind of watch that I can wear all of the time. I can’t easily fit it under a shirt or jacket cuff, and I’m constantly worried about banging it into door frames and such when I’m wearing it. Even if I wore a leather band or a metal bracelet to dress up the Ultra, it would still look like an action sports watch.
Not only does it offer a significant battery life upgrade over the Apple Watch Series 7 and even the new $399 Series 8, but it also comes with more-precise GPS and features for outdoor enthusiasts like waypoints and an enhanced compass app. It even holds the tantalizing promise of replacing your dive computer later this fall.
I think this watch is excellent, but it still won’t replace a fitness watch like the Fenix or Epix 2. For folks who use these fitness watches to measure more activities in greater detail, they also offer recovery metrics, which the Ultra simply can’t match. The built-in workout app on the Ultra barely measures any recovery at all. There are people at Cupertino who don’t take rest days, but real athletes do.
The face is bright. I liked its larger display, and I had no problems reading it in bright midday light. I wouldn’t read on the watch, but looking at big, bold notifications was a pleasure, and the blacks were in a deep and inaky state.
There is an orange action button on the opposite side of the crown, which can be used to start a workout, set a waypoint and stop one, as well as the regular crown and side button. I find it useful to start and stop my outdoor walk workout. It can be used to mark your intervals or laps.
Wayfinder, a new app for tracking trailheads and landmarks in the wilderness: application to the Apple Watch Ultra (CNN-Underscored)
And, as expected, this thing is tough. It is water resistant to 330 feet, dust resistance and tested to standards of the mil-std 810h. Its face is a flat sapphire crystal, which has yet to show any dings or scratches in a month of trekking across Cappadocia, Istanbul and Eastern Europe.
Which brings up the Wayfinder face, which is unique to the Apple Watch Ultra. It is a complicated face with compass navigation, current weather, sunrise and sunset, activity rings, elevation, latitude and your bearing. It’s a lot, but I quickly got used to it. And I really appreciated the quick access to Waypoints and Backtracking straight from the home screen when out in Cappadocia. You can even scroll up on the Digital Crown to turn the whole face red, the better to see it at night.
Along my many miles of travels in October, I dropped a few waypoints: a cool bar here in Budapest, a nice stream here in Turkey, that kind of thing — and you can program the action button to do this quickly. Then, the new compass app on the watch will show you the direction and distance of all your waypoints so you can navigate back to them. While I was using it mainly to test the feature, it’s really designed for marking campsites, trailheads or other landmarks you’d like to not lose track of when you’re out in the wilderness.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/reviews/apple-watch-ultra?iid=CNNUnderscoredHPcontainer
The Depth Gauge of the Apple Ultra: A Long-Wavelength, Multi-Day Hiking Experience in the Backwoods
Adding to this is the emergency siren, which is also unique to the Ultra. By holding the action button, you can cause an 86db siren to sound that should be able to draw attention to your location if you need assistance. I tested it in my apartment, and while it didn’t sound overly loud to me, I could see how it would cut through the relatively quiet backwoods to any first responders.
I didn’t get to try out the depth gauge, but the new app lets you turn it on automatically if you submerge the Apple Watch Ultra beyond 3 feet. The display changes to show the current time, depth, your maximum depth, the time you spent underwater and the water temperature.
The Ultra’s other features fell short in my daily use, as well. It is great that there is a button on the side of the watch, but I am not able to do much with it. (As my colleague Vjeran Pavic noted in our Ultra review video, it’d be great to have this watch change its function based on Focus Modes, much like how the watchface can automatically change.) I don’t take calls from my wrist, so the louder speaker didn’t come into play, either.
The battery life has held up well. Even when hiking up and down hills and streets for hours at a time, tracking my sleep and doing it all over again, I never ran below 20% battery life. By the end of the month, I was routinely exceeding the 36 hours Apple rates the battery for. There’s also a new low-power mode which Apple claims will provide up to 60 hours of battery life, but suffice to say, the battery is dramatically improved over the Apple Watch 8 and earlier models.
That said, it still won’t measure up to offerings by Fitbit or Garmin, which measure batteries in days or weeks, not hours. While the Apple Watch Ultra will serve you well on an all-day hike, you will need some way to charge it on a multi-day hike in the backcountry.
One, it’s big. While that doesn’t personally bother me, it might be a dealbreaker for those with smaller wrists. Smaller wrists have less area for the watch’s sensors to work with, so you’re apt to get less accurate measurements. The lower limit seems to be a 130mm diameter wrist, as that’s the smallest wrist Apple’s Ultra bands are designed for.
I had the opportunity of long-term demoing the Ultra this autumn, but it wasn’t enough to convince me to buy it, since there were many other things I liked about it. I was convinced to buy a secondhand Series 7 Edition. Here’s why.
I don’t like the flat display. It is not a good idea to interact with a curved glass Apple watch, it looks like it is separate from the rest of the design.
You may be wondering why I’m referring to the Series 7 model here, the watch that Apple released over a year ago, and not the newer Series 8, which shares its design and features. When Apple launched the Ultra, it discontinued the Edition version of the Series models that I had been looking for, so I am not able to get a Series 8 in titanium. The upside to this is that to get a Series 7 Edition, I had to buy one secondhand, and I was able to grab one in excellent condition for less than half the price of an Ultra (and half the price of what the Edition was when new).