Apple Watch Series 5 Review: One Big Tradeoff! By Marques Brownlee

What's up guys MHD here, I bet I'm, not the only one to speak to the CEO of Microsoft, while wearing an Apple Watch and I bet I'm, not the only one to chat with Bill Gates with an Apple Watch on, and I bet. He's. Also, probably noticed, though. It's not that I'm trolling, nobody does! That is trolling, it's just that it's the default. At this point, the Apple Watch is everywhere, it's the default Smartwatch for the iPhone, which is also everywhere. So after a couple of my tweets, some of you guys wanted to know my full thoughts on Apple Watch, Series 5, the latest and greatest version of it that just came out for this holiday season.

Spoiler alert I've already tweeted most of my thoughts, but I'll put them all in one video here in one place, so I have the 44 millimeter instead of the 44 that bigger face bigger battery, even though I don't have a huge wrist, I think it looks just fine, and I went with Space Gray aluminum, so I keep that dark. Matte finish and I've had no durability. Issues on my other aluminum Apple watches, and yes just to get it out the way I do wear it on my right wrist, even though I'm a righty I guess I'm just backwards like that. So if you remember that Apple event, just a couple of weeks ago, there weren't really all that many new features with the new Apple Watch. You know, there's a new brushed, titanium finish that looks really cool and there's also the other ceramics and stainless steel, and things like that and there's some other new features and some new bands, but really the main new feature of Apple Watch.

Series 5 is the always-on display. So, technically speaking, this new Apple Watch is able to maintain the always-on display with a new display technology that keeps it lit up dimly but lit up all the time at a variable refresh rate. So it's called LAP o, which stands for low temperature, poly-silicon and oxide, which doesn't really matter as much as just knowing that this involves a special controller and certain hardware. That's only in Apple Watch Series 5. So there can't be a software update to make the series 3 or series 4 do always-on it's just in series 5, so the display itself it'll, look just as good, and it'll get just as bright, and it's just a familiar OLED you're used to looking at, but now it's always on so tip when you're using an Apple Watch the OLED refreshes at 60 frames per second for 60 Hertz.

That's why animations are smooth everything, looks normal and a second hand if you have one on your clock. Face sort of smoothly rolls around in a circle. This is still the case here with this new version, but when you stop using it, or you put it down, it goes into always-on mode, the display dims, and it ratchets down to refresh as low as one Hertz or one time every second, which is fine, because it hides the second hand, and it doesn't have to show you constantly refreshing information and things smoothly on the screen. So it can still show you the time all the time and save a ton of power by not still refreshing at 60 Hertz. So, okay, what are the benefits of this always-on display? You may ask if you've never used any other Smartwatch.

Well, if you've had an Apple Watch before then you're already used to this gesture, you have to do to get it to recognize that you're looking at it and to light up whatever your latest notification is or just see the time. Sometimes you can get pretty good at it doing it subtly, but it's a pretty obvious gesture. But of course, sometimes it's just kind of hard or just straight-up inconvenient. To do that whole gesture, and you just want to be able to glance over at it and see the time or just check something real, quick without the whole obvious wrist movement, maybe you're, driving or riding a bike and don't want to switch to one hand, or maybe you're typing, and you just want to look down and glance at the time without stopping, or maybe you're in just a social situation, or it'd be kind of rude to check the time with the huge sweeping gesture. So these are all real situations, and that is why people always wanted on just the glance ability, but the most controversial trade off here with always-on is battery life.

So Apple claims that the variable refresh rate is what will help you not obliterate your battery life. It's going down to this way, low-power mode, and it's true, it doesn't completely crush your battery, but I have definitely noticed that having the OS on display always-on does hurt. Your battery life I personally went from ending the day with 50 something percent left to ending a normal day with 20 to 30% left and that's not the end of the world. That's definitely still clearly all-day battery life. For my usage, which is high brightness, getting plenty of notifications, frequent workouts things like that, but I did still notice that hid and on a day with a longer outdoor workout, where it's using GPS, and it's just always on you- can actually get close to killing the Apple Watch in a day which I never did before.

Always on and I did some more on-and-off testing with this, and some of you were actually skeptical about it. When I tweeted about it saying it was the noise app in the background or some other things was software that I should check out, but I don't need any more proof than the fact that when I turned it off, I was getting to noon with 90 plus percent battery life left, which is incredible, and that's that's legitimately 2-day battery life that I wasn't getting when I turned always-on back on. So that's something I've noticed at this point. I kind of just turned it on when I want to and then turn it off. When I know, I'm going to be having a longer day.

It's only a quick couple taps away in the settings I switched wrists. Sometimes so I'm used to diving in the settings to change the wrist orientation. So I just do that often I'll just turn always-on off, sometimes so. If I'm out at night, I'll usually turn it off, because it's slightly annoying to be the guy with the glowing wrist all night, but in a normal day at work during the day, I'll leave it on it's a balancing act. It's a little more thinking than I had to do before, but it's also a feature I've never had before, so I guess: I'm willing to do that.

Some other small thoughts. The compass built-in now is pretty sweet. I will literally never use the compass app, but it is cool that it's more accurate to tell you what direction you're facing when you're using maps and the noise app is also kind of cool. You can add a complication to your watch, face or just use the app to monitor noise levels, and it'll. Tell you when the environment you're in has potentially damaging levels of noise and just a thought about the blob, app chooser interface.

I, just got to say: I think this might be the worst UI in any Apple product in any tech product in like the last decade, I think we can all agree on that. I've changed it to list mode, maybe uh, maybe figure out a grid mode or something for picking apps on the watch. Apple just saying, but overall honestly, it's its kind of similar to that iPhone 11 review. Where, like it's, an Apple Watch like you, already know what it does, it's the same design, some subtle, tweaks and really one main new feature. I think the fact that I've disabled the O is on display so often is kind of hilarious like if you would disable it.

If you wouldn't use the always-on stuff very often, then this is about as good as this series 3 or series 4, in which case you can pick one of those up from Apple or on Amazon for a pretty steep discount, so I'll link those below that's a better deal but other than that I just kind of like the way the Apple Watch has been it's not a necessary upgrade, but for the stuff I usually do, which is having the great display telling a time. Workouts notifications, that's just basically if I mean anything extra as a bonus. Apple Watch continues to firmly deliver on all the things you expect it to and if you've always wanted always-on, then this is the Apple Watch to get. But anyway, that's about it quick review. But if you want the next stuff, it's coming up, quick, its tech, Tower, there's a lot of happening.

I've got you guys, the next one, peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee