Top Features Of The Apple Watch Ultra
An overview of the most notable features of the Apple Watch Ultra, including its improved battery life or enhanced fitness tracking capabilities.
The Apple Watch Ultra is packed with features. And nearly every feature you find in previous Apple Watch models is found in the Apple Watch Ultra. However, the Apple Watch Ultra offers tons of features that no other Apple Watch has.
Those features will help you get better battery life, track your fitness more easily, and even help you find your way if you get lost. We’ve mentioned many of these features in our Apple Watch Ultra review, but here we want to single them out.
Without further ado, here are the top features of the Apple Watch Ultra:
Apple Watch Ultra: The Action Button
Without a doubt, one of the biggest features of the Apple Watch Ultra is the Action button. This is an entirely new button on the Apple Watch Ultra – a button that does not exist on prior Apple Watches.
The Apple Watch Ultra Action button is easy to spot as it’s colored hazard orange – making it easy to see even in the dark. So, what doe the Apple Watch Ultra Action button do?
Well, whatever you want, kind of. You can set the Apple Watch Ultra Action button to automatically launch any number of features on the Apple Watch Ultra, including:
- The stopwatch
- Workout tracking
- The Compass Waypoint or Backtrack feature
- The Dive computer
- The siren
- The flashlight
- Or a Shortcut of your choice
In other words, the Action button is a physical hardware launcher and it launches whatever feature of the Apple Watch Ultra that you have software mapped to it. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to carry out multiple taps on the Apple Watch Ultra screen to launch the, for example, Compass backtrack feature. If you’ve mapped that feature to the Apple Watch Ultra Action button, you merely need to press the Action button once.
Apple Watch Ultra: The Siren
The Apple Watch Ultra has a unique feature thanks to its built-in siren capabilities. Yep, that’s exactly what it sounds like. The Apple Watch Ultra is an audible siren sound emitted by the device’s built-in speakers.
And this is no soft siren – it’s freaking LOUD. The sire can emit sounds up to 86 decibels – enough to catch the attention of someone who is up to 600 feet (about 180 meters) away from you.
Now, WHY would you use a siren? Well, imagine that you are hiking on a mountainous trail and accidentally slide down a ravine. Launching the siren on the Apple Watch Ultra can help alert others to your position so you don’t have to wear out your voice by screaming forever.
In other words, the siren is good for any situation in which you want to attract the attention of others.
Apple Watch Ultra: Up To 60 Hour Battery Life
One of the best features of the Apple Watch Ultra is its extended battery life. The regular Apple Watch Series 8 watch will get you up to 18 hours of battery life. But the Apple Watch Ultra? The Apple Watch Ultra will get you a full 36 hours of battery life in normal usage.
However, the Apple Watch Ultra can also get you much, much more battery life than that. As a matter of fact, if you enable the Apple Watch Ultra’s low power mode, it can get you up to 60 hours of battery life from the device – a full 2.5 days!
What this means is that even under normal usage, you shouldn’t need to recharge your Apple Watch Ultra every night – which means it’s free to remain on your wrist for sleep tracking.
Apple Watch Ultra: Built For Gloved Hands
Another great feature of the Apple Watch Ultra is that its Digital Crown and Side button are raised from the body on the right side of the device. This raise means that the buttons are much easier to press when wearing gloves.
Now, it might not be wintertime when you find this feature useful. If you are a climber or diver, you’re likely to find yourself wearing thick clones some of the time. Thanks to the raised buttons on the Apple Watch Ultra, you’ll be able to press them more easily – and be able to tell you have even though gloves.
Apple Watch Ultra: Compass Waypoints
With the launch of the Apple Watch Ultra, Apple redesigned the Compass app – and it also added some new features. The Apple Watch Ultra now allows you to set waypoints. This tells the compass app to make your current location, thus allowing you to later know – via the compass app – when you are facing the direction of the waypoint you dropped.
You can even name and color code the waypoints you have dropped – such as at a campsite or an area of scenic beauty – so you can easily distinguish between multiple waypoints in the compass.
But the Apple Watch Ultra also has a cool new feature called Backtrack that allows you to retrace your steps – the route you’ve tacked to where you are now. Backtrack is especially helpful in remote areas where there are no roads or obvious paths. Using Backtrack, you can navigate you way back with ease.
Apple Watch Ultra: Depth Gauge & Dive Computer
The Apple Watch Ultra has a built-in depth gauge – good considering the fact that the Apple Watch Ultra can accompany you on up to dives 40 meters deep. And what’s cool about the depth gauge is that you can set it to automatically open when the Apple Watch Ultra detects that it is submerged.
But if you want to take the water features of the Apple Watch Ultra further, you can purchase a subscription to the Oceanic+ app for Apple Watch. Apple worked with the underwater experts Huish Outdoors to bring this app – a defacto dive computer – to the Apple Watch.
As Apple explains: “The Oceanic+ app on iPhone goes beyond calculating just depth and time by integrating local conditions like tides, water temperatures, and even community‑fed info like visibility and currents. Or simply use your watch to quickly and easily plan your dive.”
The bad news is the Oceanic+ app, while free, requires a paid subscription. If you only dive once a year, you’ll be pleased to know it offers a 1-day subscription for just 99 cents. An annual subscription, for more frequent divers, costs $79.99. Monthly subscriptions are $9.99.
