Apple Watch 3 Runner Review By Running With Cameras

How's that frame? How's that frame treating you? Hmm? How's that framing? How's that focus treating you? Tasty looking watch, huh? Welcome to my awkward Apple watch 3 review If you're thinking about getting an Apple watch 3 as your main primary running watch as well as your everyday watch because that would be the main motivation to get an Apple watch in the first place I would say the biggest draw for the Apple Watch 3 as a running watch is convenience. It's great just having the watch that you're going to be charging every day or overnight every day anyway just on your wrist, so it's not like a Garmin where you have to think about charging it ahead of time and sort of looking for it when it's time to go for a run... The best part about an Apple Watch 3 as you're running watch is there it is. It's on your wrist. So you just grab your sneakers you're out the door, and you can go and you can track all your GPS data, and all that kind of stuff Let's look at the Apple Watch 3 in action showing off its waterproof features giving my dog a bath in the backyard All right, so as I stated the probably number one reason why you might want to get an Apple watch three is convenience it's awesome to have a watch that you can track all your GPS all your training and logs and all that kind of good stuff on a watch. That's already on your wrist and particularly with the Apple Watch 3 the big draw is that with a cellular plan of an extra $10 per month? you can actually get phone calls and text messages while out on the run which has huge obvious benefits for people who, you know, have kids or just in general in life it's pretty awesome to not need your phone and go out on a long run and you can get in touch with people.

Also a couple really cool safety features in the Apple Watch 3 is that if you swipe up on the watch face and then you click on this flashlight looking icon there is this steady flashlight mode, and then if you swipe to the left there's actually a blinking mode, and that could be really cool if you're running at night, and you want to make yourself more obvious to drivers that's a nice little safety feature. There's also this horizontal button on the side of the watch if you hold that down it brings up the option for an emergency SOS message and if you press that it'll go straight to like a 9-1-1 office it'll also send up a text message to whoever your emergency contact is that you have to set up ahead of time in your iPhone. If you go to the health app on your iPhone you can set up who that emergency contact is by filling out that medical ID information and it all happens pretty seamlessly and it's a great tool for you know as a runner you're out there on the roads by yourself a convenient and smart thing to do and have that set up As an overall comparison of an Apple Watch versus say this is my standalone Garmin watch, as a dedicated running watch this is probably about 3-4 years old now both waterproof The cool thing of a Garmin like this is that it's got a nice big watch face and when you're out on a run it's always active versus the whole technology to an Apple Watch is that it really becomes active when you turn the watch, or your wrist I should say, towards you And sometimes when you're running depending on your arm motion it doesn't always necessarily seem to light up-- it does most of the time, but I feel like sometimes I glance down and it actually lights up, but then goes away again, or you have to tap it to make it active but just in terms of a convenience thing a big giant watch face like a Garmin like this you're gonna look down and if you want to quickly see what your face is you're gonna see it every time whereas I feel like sometimes with the Apple watch there's that awkwardness of not seeing the information when you want it, or if it's a really bright sunny day sometimes it's a little hard to see the watch face as clearly as say a Garmin. Let's talk about music. Tons of runners obviously love to run and listen to music.

You've got a lot of options with the Apple Watch 3 One of the really cool things is that with Bluetooth you can get a pair of headphones like these are the Powerbeats 2 headphones that I have and that I like a lot. I have a trouble getting those earbuds to stay in my ears so these little overhead loop things will keep them on my head nicely and these headphones have a nice sort of volume control right on the headphones themselves so you don't have to monkey around with the watch to adjust volume. Depending on if you stream music or if you use iTunes there are a lot of different ways to get music on the watch. Obviously if you are an Apple Music subscriber you can stream up to I think they're saying 40 million songs So you've got tons of options there and because you have that cellular connection you can actually stream stuff on the go without having your phone If you use iTunes you can sync a playlist basically like download a bunch of songs onto the watch itself and I think it's got about a 2 gigabyte file limit as to how many songs you could sync onto the watch. If you're a Spotify user there is no standalone Spotify app for the watch right now, but hopefully they'll be making one There is a Pandora app to stream music on your watch But you need to have your phone with you to get it to stream music.

So battery life... if you're using cellular data so you can get phone calls and text messages out on the run, and you're listening to music you, you only get about three hours of battery life which might not be enough for a lot of people who are considering using it for a really long run or marathon or an ultramarathon. If you go into some of the power saving modes where you're probably not using that cellular data then you can get up to like five hours, which is the same as my Apple Watch 2. But obviously at that point you're kind of negating some of those reasons to get the Apple Watch 3 in the first place where you can get text messages and phone calls so shorter runs not an issue at all, but if you're going from really long runs you might have to go into those power saving modes to get your watch to last long enough through a really long runner or race Let's talk about GPS accuracy on the Apple Watch 3 So I went for a training run in Harold Parker State Forest and went out for about a two and a half hour run and I actually at all three of these watches me: the Apple Watch 2 Ashley's Apple Watch 3 and my Garmin watch. I started them all at the same time stopped them all at about the same time and to be honest they all seems pretty close to me I didn't really heavily scrutinize it they all seemed to have about the same total distance and pretty similar split so there might even a 5 or 10 second difference which to a lot of runners that's a big difference of course but to casual people who just like to kind of track what they're doing I think the Apple watch 3 is gonna hold up just fine.

My Apple Watch 2 had a weird quirky thing where just the first mile of my run would often be off and off by a lot like a good 45 seconds or a minute for some reason, and it would only happen on like one out of every three or four runs not really sure why it was doing that but it's too soon to say, Ashley's only had this for about 2 or 3 weeks as to whether or not the Apple Watch 3 is gonna have some of those little GPS timing accuracy quirks, but for the time being she hasn't seen that really show up so hopefully it's something that they've fixed and maybe if I update the iOS or the latest version on my Apple Watch 2 it may have gotten rid of that weird little quirk. Real hardcore runners that are real sticklers for accuracy and data and having the watch sort of do what you needed to do all the time you might still need to get a Garmin or some sort of dedicated running watch. For more casual runners I think the Apple Watch 3 could be the perfect sort of all-encompassing watch solution for that.

Source : Running With Cameras