Speaker 1: The Apple Watch is getting some long awaited features in Watch OS 11, like training load, customized activity rings, and more health tracking tools. But just how new are they? Hi, I’m Lexi. Welcome to your weekly dose of all things mobile. Make sure to subscribe for more. Let’s get into all the details about Watch OS 11, what clues it gives us about the next Apple Watch and why some of this might sound a little familiar bad news. First, if you have a series four or five, I’m sorry, but this new update coming later in the fall [00:00:30] isn’t going to be compatible with your watch. It’s only for the series six and later the Apple Watch, ultra one and two and the second Apple Watch se. To recap some of the big changes we’re getting training load, which is a way to measure how intense your workouts are.
Speaker 1: A new vitals app that helps you track metrics over time. A way to pause your activity rings when you need a sick or a rest day. Double tap is coming to more apps, including third party ones and live activities and new options will appear in the smart stack, otherwise known as those widgets that overtook your watch when you installed [00:01:00] watchOS 10. We are coming up on the 10 year anniversary of Apple Watch, so I’m expecting Apple will want to save a lot of the big flashy features for that announcement sometime in September. In the meantime, watchOS 11 gives us one big hint of what might be coming with a new vitals app. When you track sleep with the Apple Watch, it’s measuring metrics like heart rate, blood, oxygen, risk, temperature and more. So this new app lets you view trends over time and get alerts if any of those vitals fall outside of your usual range.
Speaker 1: If there are two [00:01:30] or more metrics that are out of range, the Apple Watch will give you a notification of why this might be the case. Maybe it’s from having too much to drink the night before or you’re getting sick. Sound familiar? Yep. The Apple Watch has been tracking all of this data for a while now, but this is the first time it’s actually trying to interpret all of this for you and give you some warnings rather than you needing to dig through that health app and find it all. Now some other wearables and smart rings like the Aura Ring. Do this by giving you an idea of your baseline readings and some interpretations. The [00:02:00] Apple Watch series 10 is rumored to get some sort of blood pressure monitoring likely done in the background that is tracking trends over time rather than those specific systolic and diastolic readings.
Speaker 1: The Vitals app is the perfect place for this information to live and gets us used to seeing a range of metrics in this format before it rolls out to something maybe like blood pressure monitoring or perhaps another ruit health feature on the series 10 sleep apnea detection and to power all this. Let’s hope this series 10 is going to do one better on battery life. One [00:02:30] thing the Apple Watch was missing for more serious athletes was Recovery metrics. Watch US 11 brings a feature called Training Load to the Apple Watch, taking into account your workout metrics like heart rate, elevation and pace, and then combining that with your height and weight information. To give you a better picture of how hard your training, this is going to give you a score out of 10, which can be helpful to determine if you are over or under training, which is especially helpful if you’re working towards something like a marathon or another sports race. You’ll see
Speaker 2: The strain from workouts [00:03:00] from your past seven days compared to the last 28 days. Whoop and Garmin also have a similar readiness load feature, so this isn’t a new concept, but it is a long awaited feature for a lot of Apple Watch users, myself included. Now maybe Apple could take it one step further and lean on Apple Intelligence to link together a custom workout program or routine based on your weekly progress. I’m hoping to see something like that in the series 10. The smart stack now supports live activities. [00:03:30] For example, if you’re following a sports game on the iPhone that uses a live activity on the lock screen, that same score is going to appear at the top of the stack on the watch. If you call an Uber, the ETA might appear and there’s also widgets from Shazam, the photos app and severe weather alerts that will show thunderstorm warnings when appropriate and there’s now a translate app and that widget will appear in the smart stack automatically when you travel to a location with a different language dictate into the watch and you’ll hear a response in that other language.
Speaker 2: [00:04:00] Watch S 11 gives us a check-in feature on the Apple Watch that you can send from the Messages app and it works just like it does on the iPhone. Now, you can also send that from the workout app. Your contacts will get a notification that shows your ETA and an alert when you arrive at your destination. Similar to how the Pixel Watch uses its safety check feature. The thing is check-in only works with other Apple users running iOS 17 or later. Something I wanted for a very long time on the app watch is a way to send friends and family my location when I’m on a workout or even just [00:04:30] commuting to work on my bike. But a lot of those contacts are on Android. Maybe the Series 10 could integrate another safety feature like say Strava’s Beacon that lets you send a link to your location to friends and family.
Speaker 2: After all, you can FaceTime with Android users through a browser and a link so it’s not totally outside the realm of possibility. Something even more helpful for safety I would love to see on the series 10 and this requires new hardware, is satellite connectivity. So if you’re without signal and you happen to leave your iPhone [00:05:00] at home, you can text and get help when you just have the watch with you. And for me, the most surprising announcement about Watch Show 11 is what we didn’t get compared to iOS 18, especially integrations with Apple Intelligence and Siri. You can now get summaries from Apple Intelligence on the Apple Watch, but there are so many more voice assistant features that we are missing out on here and I’m speculating Maybe it’s because we need a new chip in the Apple Watch. So series 10, I am looking at you. Let me know what else you [00:05:30] want on the next Apple Watch and your thoughts about watch OS 11 in the comments. I’ll be reading them all and I will catch you next time. See ya.
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#Apple #Watch #Features #Coming #WatchOS #Video
