Wesley's Tool-Box

To compare the battery life of the Gen 1 and Series 2 Apple Watches in a fair manner, I wore both devices on the same arm for as long as the device's battery lasted. In doing so, I was also able to see if there were any differences in the logged activity data. I'll be talking about this first.

I should note that this test required carrying two iPhones, one for each watch. While Apple did introduce 'auto switch' feature in iOS 9.3 and watchOS 2.2 to let a user use multiple Apple Watches, only one watch can be active at a time. So to log the activities independently and simultaneously, I paired Series 2 to iPhone 7 Plus and Gen 1 to iPhone 7. The phones were in my pants so that they would always be close to the watches. Both had been through more than 20 minutes of calibration walks before the testing as well. Let's see what the final results of this walking session.


The calorie and heart rate measurements were nearly the same, meaning that both Apple Watches saw nearly the same amount of activity. This is assuring as the measurement back-end for the workout session is consistent across generations.

One of the reasons why the 1st generation (Gen 1) Apple Watch felt limited was due to its noticeably slow performance. App performance, especially the 3rd party ones, was sluggish enough that I eventually gave up making much use of them. The watchOS 3 update has implemented a lot of optimizations that alleviate the problem, but it couldn't hide the fact that the CPU simply was underpowered. Apple Watch Series 2 aimed to fix this by putting a CPU twice as powerful. Let's see if it worked out. First up is the boot speed. All tests were done with watchOS 3.0 installed.


Compared to iPhones or modern computers, Apple Watches are notoriously slow to boot up. Gen 1 still takes more than two minutes and while Series 2 is faster, it isn't significantly so. Fortunately, you won't need to reboot it often, so it's a minor annoyance at best. If you want to see the boot speed in real time, here's the boring video.

Like what happened last year, contents of a recent interview has just been published on a newspaper. It was with an industrial news outlet called "E2News" this time, dealing with the iPhone app I developed last August. I was glad my face was published along with the article, but sadly my last name was misprinted on the paper edition ("Cho" instead of "Chung") and that led to some confusion here and there. I requested a correction and the online and PDF versions reflect this properly.

For more details, see below.

- Online Article (Korean)

- PDF Version (See Page 6)