A smartwatch is one of the most useful devices you can integrate into your everyday life, and it also makes a great gift for the holiday season. And when it comes to wearables, there’s hardly a product as sophisticated as the Apple Watch.
Apple’s smartwatch is packed with advanced health and communication features, and stories regularly surface online about how it saved a person’s life. But these smartwatches can do much more than just keep an eye on your heart rate, track your sleep, and interact with notifications.
There are many features of the Apple Watch that add an extra dose of convenience to your everyday life. If you’re getting a new Apple Watch or helping a family member set it up, here are a few tips and tricks worth trying.
Gestures
The primary way to operate an Apple Watch is by touching and swiping on the screen. However, you can do a variety of tasks on it using wrist and finger tap gestures. For example, you double-tap your thumb and index finger to perform actions on Apple Watch without touching the screen.
For example, you can play/pause music, choose between Forward and Select when navigating the Smart Stack, answer a phone call, and even reply to an incoming text message. You can activate it by following this path: Settings > Gestures > Double-tap.
Additionally, Apple Watch also supports wrist gestures, which are enabled by default. You can quickly flip and turn your wrist back to dismiss notifications and return to the watch face. This gesture lets you manage calls, timers, and notifications, and is handy when you can’t quite touch your smartwatch’s screen.
This gesture is supported on Apple Watch SE 3, Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and later models. Similarly, you can also simply cover the smartwatch screen for three seconds to silence an incoming alarm. This can also be enabled via the gesture dashboard in the Settings app.
Sleep assessment
With the recent watchOS 26 update, Apple introduced a new feature called Sleep Score. This is an easier way to understand the quality of your rest time rather than giving users a graphical breakdown of scientific terms like Core and REM.
According to Apple, this is “a value based on estimates of how long you slept, how consistent the timing of sleep onset was compared to your recent history, and the number and duration of wakefulness during sleep.” The time you spent in each sleep phase is also taken into account.
The quality of your sleep is rated on a scale of 0 to 100 in five levels, ranging from very low to very high. To use this feature, you must first set up your sleep schedule and sleep goals. You can do this on the paired iPhone as follows:
Health app turned on iPhone > Set up sleep mode > Getting started. You can also set it up and make changes in the Slee app on your Apple Watch. But first, you need to go to the Watch app on your iPhone, navigate to the Sleep page, and make sure Track Sleep with Apple Watch is turned on. On the same page, you’ll also find an option to turn on sleep score notifications.
Vital signs tracking while you sleep
The Apple Watch supports dozens of training sessions and can collect a variety of biometric data. The smartwatch can measure heart rate, breathing rate, wrist temperature and blood oxygen – all important metrics if you’re actively tracking your workout.
However, these biomarkers are also very valuable during sleep. “For your Apple Watch data to work for you, you have to sleep with it,” said Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, recently told CNET, adding that it’s an overnight snapshot of your health.
Factors such as illness, medication, altitude and alcohol consumption can affect heart rate, breathing, blood oxygen levels, temperature and sleep quality. The overnight vital signs tracking system keeps an eye on all of these metrics and if it detects anything that is outside of your typical range, you will receive a notification about it the next morning.
All of this data can be accessed via the Vitals app pre-installed on your Apple Watch. The symbol consists of four circular rings, three of which are blue and the top one is purple. You can also keep an eye on your vitals overnight in the Health app on your iPhone. Keep in mind that you need to sleep with your Apple Watch continuously for at least seven days to reach a “normal” range before the watch alerts you to any abnormalities in your body’s activities while you sleep.
Water lock
The Apple Watch tolerates exposure to water quite well and can withstand immersion at a depth of up to 50 meters. However, water resistance is not permanent and due to natural wear and tear over time and repeated exposure, it decreases as the seal weakens. It goes without saying that you want to avoid this fate.
To this end, the Apple Watch has a water lock feature that automatically activates during water-based workouts like swimming or surfing. When enabled, all touch responses on the screen are temporarily disabled. More importantly, this feature helps expel water from the speaker cavity.
Let’s say you’re washing an item of daily use or carrying out a related activity that inevitably involves the watch coming into contact with water. All you need to do is open Control Center by clicking the side button and tapping the waterdrop icon to activate it.
Once the task is completed, press and hold the Digital Crown or rotate it until the “Unlocked” message appears on the screen. The Apple plays different types of music and uses the vibration to expel water from the speaker cavities.
Find a misplaced iPhone
I often lose my iPhone and it can be a hassle to find it because I leave work focus modes enabled to silence incoming notifications. Luckily, Apple Watch can help you locate a misplaced iPhone by beeping loudly and providing a visual alert by blinking the LED flash.
All you have to do is press the side button and tap on the phone icon. When the phone is within Bluetooth range, it will ring and a directional guidance view with distance estimates will also appear on the watch screen. When you tap and hold the button, the iPhone’s LED will also flash, making it easier to find it in the dark.
But even in situations where you have forgotten the Apple Watch away from home or think that it has been stolen, the Apple Watch can come to the rescue again. It can even help find iPhones (or other Apple devices with Find My enabled) when they are turned off or in offline mode.
All you need to do is open Devices on your Apple Watch (a green icon with a laptop and a phone), tap the iPhone you want to locate, then select “Directions” on the next page. This will open a guided view in Apple Maps along with directions.
On the same page, you will find an option called “Notify me if you are left behind”. This feature displays a warning every time the connected iPhone exceeds the Apple Watch’s connection limit. However, you can set up exceptions for places like home or office to prevent the feature from accidentally triggering in familiar or safe locations.
