When Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 2, at the beginning of the month, much was celebrated about the novelties of the new version of the watch that make it a much more independent and attractive piece of hardware in relation to its predecessor. The focus on the fitness, mainly reflected in the inclusion of a GPS receiver, shows well the new trail that Apple wants to follow in the smartwatches business – goodbye, market fashion haute couture and super celebrities; hello, runners, sportsmen and Kléber Bambam.
However, it is not because Apple decided to give more resources to the second series of its Watch that the watch is omnipotent. Who sang the ball first was the The Verge: There are a number of things that, even with updated hardware, the Apple Watch Series 2 cannot do – things that, theoretically, would be important to at least part of your target audience. We will briefly analyze them in the following paragraphs; this way, if you are planning to buy a copy of the novelty, you will already know exactly what awaits you.
First of all, it is important to mention that the Series 2 cannot measure variations in elevation User – The built-in GPS sensor detects only the flat global position, ie, regardless of whether you are on top of Everest or in the Netherlands. This is a significant limitation for climbers, adventure cyclists and hikers, so if it is an important resource for you, you will still need to take your iPhone with you on your journeys; yes, it measures the positional elevation and passes the data to the Apple Watch.
Another important point is that the new generation continues without any kind of sleep reading of user. Perhaps this is a measure thought by Apple, since the battery of the watch, although better than before, has not yet reached the desired state of the art and the bug still needs to be recharged practically every night. The fact is, if you want to record your patterns in bed (I mean, sleeping), you will need to look the other way: smart wristbands like Fitbit have been doing this job with some success for years.
The new Apple watch is also not proactive to the point of automatically detecting which activity the user is currently engaged in – each session must be manually started and saved / completed, which can represent a setback for those who like to go to the gym and move between different modalities, such as aerobic training, swimming and weight training.
Speaking of bodybuilding, by the way, this is an area where the Watch Series 2 still owes: it is now possible to select a series of exercises within the “muscle training” activity, but the watch effectively is not monitoring anything in addition to the time you spend on that task. Series, rests, weight and movements are excluded from reading, and only an average well above the activity’s energy expenditure is recorded.
Image: Aloisio KreischerFinally, it is also important to talk about the swimming field, one of the great attractions of the new water resistant model. Apple has implemented an ingenious trick to expel fluids from the speaker, which means that the clock sounds will be audible the moment the user leaves the pool or sea. However, Cupertino engineers have yet to discover the magic: the Apple Watch Series 2 screen, like any capacitive touchscreen, is inoperative in contact with liquids.
To get around the problem, Apple added a second type of lock mode, accessible from the Control Center through the water drop icon, dedicated to these wet situations: the mode locks the screen, shows the activity reading information and requires that Digital Crown be turned to unlock the watch (when it does, it also sounds to expel liquids from the speaker).
This is just a small summary of things you should be aware of if you are thinking of spending your rich buck on an Apple Watch Series 2. We will not stop here, of course – we will soon publish a full review of our next generation impressions. Anyway, as the saying goes: the more you know…
