Apple Watch Series 6 Features, Battery life, oximeter, Watch Faces, Review,

12:30 AM

Apple Watch Series 6: Blood oxygen, new colours and battery improvements

The Apple Watch Series 6 is official, and brings bold new colors and a big new health feature. It was announced alongside the Apple Watch SE at the Apple Time Flies virtual event.

Apple Watch Series 6 Features, Battery life, oximeter, Watch Faces, Review,

While Apple Watch has left the smartwatch world playing catchup since 2014, it's the Series 6 that makes up ground this time.

Like many smartwatches in 2020, the Series 6 gets an SpO2 sensor to measure blood oxygen for the first time.

watchOS 7 will also bring native sleep tracking to the mix, but as usual we got a host of new hardware features that make the Series 6 the most advanced Apple Watch we've seen to date.

Rumoured Apple Watch Series 6 in brief:

Blood oxygen monitoring
$399 price tag
Release date: 18 September
Always-on altimeter
Faster charging
New blue, graphite, gold and (PRODUCT)RED colors.

New Apple Watch Series 6 colors

Top left: Graphite stainless steel
Top right: (PRODUCT)RED aluminum
Bottom left: Gold stainless steel
Bottom right: Blue aluminum

Apple Watch Series 6 features

Blood oxygen tracking

The monitoring of blood oxygen has been a feature of smartwatches in 2020, and now the Apple Watch has the feature too.
The new red light sensor will monitor the color of the blood being reflected back, and thus the level of oxygen.
Apple Watch will use the Blood Oxygen app to perform a spot check, but it will also take readings if you wear it to sleep. These are the most useful blood oxygen readings.
You will find readings in the Apple Health app.
Blood oxygen data can point to sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, and there's been an increased focus with COVID-19.
And as such, Apple is also starting three new research projects, studying at the relationship between blood oxygen and asthma, heart disease and flu/COVID.

Apple Watch Series 6 internals and battery life

The Apple Watch Series 6 unsurprisingly uses the company's sixth generation S6 chip, which does unlock new features and performance.

It's based on the A13 Bionic chip in the iPhone, although optimised for Apple Watch.

It's 20% faster than the S5 and maintains the 18 hour battery life, even with the demands of nightly SpO2 readings and offers a 2.5x boost in always-on display brightness in daylight.

There's also a new always-on altimeter, which will keep tabs of altitude.

You'll also find a new U1 chip and Ultra Wideband antennas, which will enable features like keyless car entry.

Apple Watch Series 6: Battery life

There was little spoken about battery life at the Apple Watch event, perhaps not wanting to concede to the con

stant background moaning about battery life.

Increasingly, the Apple Watch is an outlier in the smartwatch world with just 18 hours of battery life. And with sleep tracking and SpO2 now a major feature, it's clear some movement had to be made.

Sadly, battery life stays at 18 hours, although that does now include the use of SpO2 and nightly readings.

However, battery charge time has been slashed. A full charge now takes 1.5 hours, down from 2.5 on previous Apple Watch editions.

That means it's easier for users to charge when they wake up and before leaving the house, or before bed, to keep all-day wear.

But clearly, it still lags devices like Fitbit Sense (six days) and the Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro (14 days).

Apple Watch Family Setup

Not exclusively an Apple Watch Series 6 feature, the new Family Setup is essentially a kids mode, enabling you to give your children an Apple Watch even if they don't have an iPhone.

Family Setup works for Apple Watch Series 4 and newer, for LTE editions only.

It means you can set up a second Apple Watch with your iPhone.

Features include the ability for the kids smartwatch to call/message approved contacts only, access GPS location data including alerts and School Time, which ensures it doesn't disrupt lessons.