Gadgetory

hi I'm Lauren good for The Verge and I am looking at the Apple watch Series 3 as expected this one has LTE connectivity which we use it works without the iPhone so let's check it out you can see here there's a little calling icon at the top there those dots in the middle are an indication of your LTE signal strength you can swipe up here you can also see it there and then one aesthetic difference between this watch and previous generations is that you'll notice the digital crown is red which is supposed to indicate that this is an LTE equipped series three Apple watch so it looks exactly the same as the other Apple watches that you've seen before but there is one slight aesthetic difference it is a little bit thicker on the bottom here so if you look at this heart rate sensor module here and you were to compare that to an older watch in fact I'm wearing one right now you can see that it's just the slightest bit thicker hey Apple says it's two sheets of paper thicker which is just I know a brilliant but typical marketing statement to make about it but when I was wearing it on my wrist earlier so I put this on really didn't feel all that different and honestly it doesn't look thicker just looks the same as previous apple watches aside from the addition of an LTE modem one of the things that's different on this watches watch OS 4 it's running new software and there's a software that's going to run at all Apple watches not just this one you can see here that when you're scrolling through your app dock now it is a scroll vertically rather than across like you used to there's some direct integration with gym equipment so if you go to a gym that happens to support Apple watch software you can carry your watch directly the gym equipment there is more Siri integration you can basically talk to Siri on the watch and it will talk back to you which it didn't use to do and even though these heart rate sensors in the back look pretty much the same except for a little bit of thickness apple's doing some interesting stuff around a heart rate tracking now it's going to show you your resting heart rate it's going to show you when your heart rate is spiking even when you're not working out so basically it's taking the same sensor set but it's processing the data and it's different ways to make this smarter and I think that makes a lot of sense because one of the big drivers for people to buy smart watches not just Apple watch but smart watches in general are the health and fitness tracking features right you get notifications you can track your health and fitness and in some cases to use it for authentication like like Apple pay but those are really the three main value propositions I mean there's all the other stuff too you can go to a cluster of apps just like you used to that hasn't really changed so in a lot of ways the Apple watch Series 3 isn't a dramatic difference from previous versions but with the addition of LTE and with the new software it's largely going to be a combination of things that make it a little bit more capable than previous watches it's not a replacement for iPhone it's still in a relationship with iPhone but it's a little more independent without it now this new Apple watch series 3 is going to be available on September 22nd this one with LTE costs 399 dollars there is going to be a series 3 without LTE and that's going to cross $329 and then the serious one which is the original Apple watch which doesn't have GPS doesn't have waterproofing it doesn't have LTE that one is 249 dollars series 2 has essentially gone away because the series 3 without LTE is that for more coverage go to youtube.com slash Virg you