Another thing to charge
By Abby Turner, Melbourne ยท
My bedside table already looks like a phone shop, so my first gripe with any Apple Watch is that it wants to join the charging queue more or less every day. After a twelve-hour night shift plus the drive home, that matters.
Right, complaint lodged. The rest is mostly good news. At 46 mm and 9.7 mm thick this is the bigger Series 11, but it sits flat and the aluminium case is light enough that I'd forget it was there by 3 am. The screen is the selling point for me: big, bright, and the seconds are right there in giant numbers if I set it up that way, which is all I want when I'm counting a resp rate. The ECG and heart rate stuff is nice to have, though I'd never treat a wrist reading as anything more than a nudge to go and get a proper one.
Ion-X glass on the aluminium model is my other reservation. It's tougher than it sounds, but sapphire it isn't, and bed rails and drug trolleys are hard on screens. A 50 m rating is plenty for hand washing, showers and a paddle at the beach.
At US$429 to $529 it makes sense if you're already on an iPhone. If you're on Android, don't bother, it won't pair. And if you hate charging things, buy a G-Shock and save yourself $400.