Apple Watch Series 10 Review: Arm candy that really works

Millimetres matter. Maybe not when it comes to distance, but definitely in the thickness of a watch.

As a lover of haute horology, yours truly has worn quite a few timepieces from traditional watchmakers with pride (and deep buyer’s remorse, given their astronomical prices) on occasions. Now, these are all about the art of watchmaking and classical design with the handcrafted precision of mechanical movements. And in the pursuit of perfection, the traditional watch industry has arrived at a metric for thickness that is by now well-established as the gold standard to aspire to: the average automatic watch from the world’s leading brands is about 12.5mm thick.

When it came to smartwatches, though, bundling all that function inside a wearable, wrist-sized form necessitated a thicker, chunkier build, that made the heft of the device quite palpable on your wrist whenever you wore them. Until now, that is.

With the new Apple Watch Series 10, Apple has managed to shave off one whole millimetre from its predecessor, the Apple Watch 9, which was already among the slimmest watch wearables. The result is a watch that is only 9.7mm thick.

Now what does that number translate into in real world usage? Not only does the Series 10 sit much better on the wrist, slide under shirt and jacket cuffs unobtrusively and feel lighter and more “watch-like” to wear, more importantly for a smart watch with great health tracking features, it is now much easier to keep on while asleep.

This is the largest Apple Watch so far, with a screen that is only slightly bigger than the Series 9 but almost 30 percent bigger than the Series 6. I’m sure all users would like larger displays – I do – on their smartwatches like the one on the Series 10, which is also a wide-angle OLED for better off-axis viewing. But it’s cumbersome to wear a watch that is too bulky or uncomfortable, especially overnight – and I’ve never truly embraced the Ultras for this reason.

With the Series 10, however, Apple manages to strike a balance. Despite the larger screen – its larger version is a 46mm - it weighs only 35.3g without the band. To put that in perspective, the 45mm Apple Watch Series 9 in aluminium weighs 51.5g, and the nearly 16g of weight is noticeable.

Again, while these are just numbers, the Series 10 feels light and easy on the wrist, providing all-day comfort and even sleep-friendliness. This increase in size and reduction in weight is even more remarkable when you consider that all models of the Series 10 include both GPS and cellular capabilities, which were hitherto typically slightly heavier. This time around, Apple has re-engineered the watch’s internal structure to make a huge difference in wearability.

And this is just as well, because it helps in using the ‘Sleep Apnea’ feature on the device. This feature enables detection of the condition where you stop breathing during your night’s sleep momentarily at intervals, which can cause cardiovascular or metabolic issues if left untreated. Apple's uses a different technique for detection on the Series 10 compared to other watches, with an accelerometer to track a new metric called breathing disturbances.

After setting up the feature, I wore the watch to bed for more than 10 nights within a 30-day period, as recommended, at the end of which I was diagnosed with only a very mild case of the affliction. Even without sleep apnea notification, you can still get a sense of how restfully you’re sleeping by tracking each night's breathing disturbances in the Health app, which rates these disturbances as either elevated or not.

With the Series 10 running Apple’s new WatchOS11, there are new health and fitness tools to take advantage of apart from the sleep apnea tool, including ‘Vitals’, which tracks key metrics during sleep like heart rate, respiratory rate and wrist temperature, highlighting them in pink if they go outside the normal range. And these can all be monitored on your wrist every morning the moment you wake up, meaning you do not have to reach for your iphone and open the Health app to access the data. Other useful health tools include the ability to set different workout targets for each day of the week and to measure the intensity of your workout routine with the Training Load feature.

Among other great features, a new ‘voice isolation’ system reduces background noise on phone calls and FaceTime. Testing this feature out on a busy street near a noisy construction site, I was pleasantly surprised by how muted and distant the ambient sounds became when on the calls. I was being heard clearly over the din at the other end of the line and was receiving clear audio from the person I had called. Now, if you live or work near one of the innumerable job-sites in construction infested Dubai, you can still manage your phone and video calls with ease.

Another great audio features is that you can now play music on the Apple Watch Series 10 speaker, so on those occasions when you forget to carry your headphones on your daily run, you still won’t have to work out in silence. The volume was loud enough to surround us with an ambience of sound but not loud enough in noisy outdoor situations to cause any conspicuous disturbance. Audio playback is possible from first-party apps like Podcasts, Apple Music and Audiobooks through the speaker, as well as a few third-party apps like Spotify.

Another major improvement is in the charging time. In our experience, Apple Watches have so far been notoriously slow in tanking up their batteries. The 2021 Series 7 reached 80 percent charge in a slow 45 minutes even after Apple halved the charging time for the previous series; but with the Series 10, Apple has now reduced that to a very respectable 30 minutes.

The Series 10 can also be submerged to a depth of six-metres and has a depth gauge like its bigger sibling, the Ultra 2. Now, that not scuba-diving depths, but will do nicely for snorkelling when coupled with the Oceanic Pluss app that was previously only meant for the Ultra. At any rate, the Series 10 gives you the assurance that you can keep the device on in the shower without any worry.

One major foible that we faced – and this may just be restricted to our test mule – was the difficult in setting up the cellular feature. After umpteen tries at home, we had to admit defeat and at last take to the Apple store, where a technician did some resetting and finally re-connected the e-SIM that we had been using on the Series 9 watch. For a device that costs from Dh1,599 (aluminium 42mm) to Dh2,999 (titanium 46mm) we were expecting easier and hassle-free setting up of this important feature – and this marred an excellent experience somewhat.

On the whole, the latest Apple Watch Series 10 is not a revolution in the Apple watches that fans were looking for but an evolution with incremental improvements, though important ones. And the millimetres it shaves off its previous iteration are among the biggest of these.

Apple Watch Series 10

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