Apple recently previewed watchOS 7 at the Worldwide Developers Conference. This latest wearable device OS offers advanced customisation tools, fitness tracking features and more workout types. There are also new ways to personalise your Apple Watch using customizable watch faces. Apart from this, Apple’s watchOS 7 has everything needed to motivate its users to stay fit, active and healthy. Apple’s watchOS 7 will be soon available as a public beta with lots of interesting features.
The Apple Watch Series 5 is among the latest smartwatches to feature an Always-On display, eliminating the need for waking up the screen. Apple has designed personalized watch faces, optimized for battery-efficiency. They reduce brightness, automatically fade out colours and pause animations when idle. Apple has a watch faces collection with different designs, font styles and colours, meant to give quick access to your favourite apps and valuable information. The watchOS 7 update offers more customization and new watch faces to suit your style and activities. The best part is you can share customised watch faces with your friends and family through messages, emails or by posting links on social media.
Apple’s sleep tracking feature has now taken a new holistic approach. There are several ways to create schedules and pre-bedtime routines. Once the ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode is turned on, the watch face dims, and your iPhone’s lock screen displays a “Sleep Well” message. Your watch can now intelligently track hours slept and sleep patterns. The details are available on the watch itself and users can analyse it. The visualisations include sleep sessions and weekly sleep records. The Wind Down feature can assist users in establishing a bedtime routine, and it even includes shortcuts to meditation apps to play silent music and to dim the lights. The sleep data is encrypted and can be synced to the Health app on your iPhone or iCloud.
The Workout app update brings four new exciting workout types supported by custom-built motion algorithms and heart rate tracking. Your Apple Watch can now accurately track fitness metrics for dance, core training, functional strength training, and post-workout cooldown. Also, the Activity app on iPhone has been redesigned and renamed to ‘Fitness’. Apple Watch uses inputs from the heart rate sensor, gyroscope and accelerometer for measuring accurate inputs. Also, there are four popular dance styles introduced – Bollywood, hip-hop, cardio dance and Latin. The redesigned Fitness app lets you view your daily activity details, workouts, awards and activity trends data at one place. You can even share this data and compete with your friends or family.
Washing hands is a good practice to prevent the spread of diseases. Your watch will now alert you to wash hands. It uses the microphone, motion sensors and on-device machine learning to detect handwashing motion, which triggers a 20-second timer. The Health app provides information on the importance of handwashing and simultaneously tracks the duration and frequency of the user’s handwashing patterns.
You will appreciate the new watchOS 7 update if you cycle or drive an electric car. Apple Maps lets you find cycling routes and electric car charging stations using your watch. Cycling routes include bike lanes, information about busy roads and elevation changes. Apple Maps alerts you with instructions such as “take the stairs” or “dismount and walk” if the added route requires you to get off your cycle. You can even search for nearby cafes or bike shops and add them to your route for a pit stop.
Apple Siri has gotten better with the new update. You can do almost anything on your watch. The dictation is now processed on the Apple Watch for faster and reliable functioning. You can also use the new translation feature to start conversations in other languages. Siri on the Apple Watch can translate to 10 languages. Using this feature is as simple as asking “How do you say welcome in Japanese?”.
Listening to music at high volumes can damage hearing without you even realising it. The Apple Watch now alerts you about high-decibel noises around you and how long you’ve been listening to loud music. Apple’s watchOS 7 will be available as a public beta this month. Three of Apple’s watches, the Series 3, Series 4 and the Series 5 will get it. Apple Watch running watchOS 7 require an iPhone 6S or newer models, running iOS 14.
