How do you celebrate the world’s most popular smartwatch hitting double digits? With the Watch Series 10, Apple has forsaken revolution and chosen the path of refined evolution, tweaking the design to improve usability and comfort. This is arguably the most comfortable smartwatch I’ve ever had on my wrist.
As with past Apple Watches, you could easily mistake the new Series 10 for a Series 9 from a distance, but upon closer inspection, you begin to realize it’s a rather sizable upgrade, hardware wise. Still very much the squircle shape, but with a larger 1,220 square mm display area on the new 46mm model – that’s a bump of 9% from the Series 9 and a massive 30% if you’re upgrading from a Series 6 or older variant. It’s a smidgen larger in terms of usable display than even the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and is the first to incorporate wide-angle OLED tech for significantly better off-angle viewing. And courtesy the LTPO3 display which allows the refresh rate to drop all the way down to 1Hz, you now get a per-second hand movement on the gorgeous new Flux watch face.
While the Series 10 has grown larger, it’s just 9.7mm thick, which makes it 10% thinner and 10% lighter than the previous gen. There’s a noticeable difference in how comfortable the Series 10 is on the wrist, particularly if you’re used to wearing it overnight for sleep tracking. I’ve been wearing the 46mm Apple Watch Series 10 in Jet Black, a glossy aluminum finish that looks striking and harks back to the glossy iPhone 7 in the same shade. You can pick up the Series 10 in polished titanium as well for the first time. The good news for anyone upgrading is that there’s no change in the watch band system, so all your previous bands will continue to be compatible with the 42mm and 46mm models.
Out of the box, the Series 10 runs watchOS 11 which supports, among other handy updates, Live Activities from your iPhone to appear directly on your watch. All the usual health and activity features abound, and the Watch Series 10 closely aligns with the Series 9, the Watch Ultra 2 and the Galaxy Watch Ultra in terms of key metric counts. There’s a new Sleep Apnea detection feature which uses the accelerometer to detect breathing disturbances during sleep, but it is yet to roll out in India. You also get the ability to play back music, podcasts and audio content from your Apple Watch directly, and if you regularly take calls on the watch say while cooking or working out, the microphone now identifies your voice and blocks out background noise rather well, almost at par with the voice isolation mode on the iPhone.
Powering the Series 10 is the new S10 chip, and it’s expectedly zippy with opening apps, loading content and dictating messages on the go. Despite the 1Hz refresh rate on the display, battery life isn’t significantly better, and I had to charge it once a day with always-on enabled, a day’s worth of notifications and my daily 45-minute walk tracked. Apple has bumped up charging speeds on the Series 10, so you can charge all the way up to 80% in about 30 minutes, or about a full night’s worth of charge for sleep tracking with a quick splash-and-dash on the charger for 10 minutes. It’s still some way away from true multi-day use like the Watch Ultra 2, though.
For a watch that has inherited the same general design as previous Apple Watches, it almost feels odd to say the Series 10 feels like a new, different watch on the wrist. But it does, so the tweaks made for comfort and usable screen space make it a very worthwhile purchase, not to mention a considerable upgrade for older Watch owners.
Rating: 8/10
Price: Rs. 46,900 onwards