Xbox controller support is coming to Samsung’s Gear VR headset
Last month, Microsoft announced plans to bring Xbox Wireless tech to PCs and other gaming accessories starting with Lenovo’s IdeaCentre Y710 Cube. Today, the company went a step further with controller support for Samsung’s Gear VR headset. That’s right, the Xbox Wireless Controller will soon work with Samsung’s phone-driven virtual reality device. Minecraft: Gear VR Edition will be the first game to make use of the feature, but eventually you’ll be able to use it on any Gear VR title with controller support.
While the Gear VR version of Minecraft is already available, an update next month will flip the switch on the controller compatibility. You’ll also need to make sure you have the latest update for the Xbox accessory as well, which is already available. When the game update arrives in October, all you’ll need to do is download it and connect the controller via Bluetooth to start playing. Microsoft says it’s working to bring Xbox controller support to both existing and future Gear VR games and promises more details “in the coming months.”
Source: Xbox Wire
UPS testing drones to deliver emergency medical supplies
Remember when Amazon announced Prime Air drone delivery back in 2013? Following the excited hubbub, other services including UPS scrambled to try out competitive airbone services. But then everyone ran into a slew of logistics and regulations issues, which have taken years to untangle. In the past few months, Google was given FAA approval for drone deliveries and Amazon might bypass regulation entirely for its air shipping. But UPS is going in a different direction: Testing UAVs to ferry emergency medical supplies.
The shipping service began trials this week in rural Massachusetts. A test flight on Thursday carried a package from Beverly, a town north of Boston, to Children’s Island. It was handled by local drone maker CyPhy, in which UPS owns a stake. Though the FAA passed restrictions on “non-hobbyist” drone use at the end of August, the shipping company will appeal for exceptions to those rules, including one limiting flight to line-of-sight.
As for the concept of delivering medical supplies via drones? A US start-up has been ferrying blood and vaccines in Rwanda since July, which UPS announced it was financially backing in May.
Source: Reuters
Recalled Samsung Galaxy Note 7s can be charged to 80 percent
If you’ve failed to heed the warnings of Samsung and government regulators, it looks like you can now charge those recalled Note 7 batteries to 80 percent. The phones were recalled globally earlier this month following reports of exploding batteries, but the company issued an update that limited charges on the phone to 60 percent to avoid potential issues. That update only rolled out in Korea and didn’t make it to the US.
SamMobile reports that if you choose to toggle off the battery-limiting feature, you can charge the faulty phones to 80 percent. It’s unclear whether this change will make it to the US, but we’ve reached out to Samsung for more information. Even still, you’re taking a big risk by continuing to use the phones.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission urged customers in the US to stop using the devices and return them immediately. Samsung has already shipped more than 500,000 replacement handsets to the US and said earlier this week than a quarter of gadgets sold in the country had already been returned. Seriously, just go ahead and return yours if you haven’t already. After you do, you’ll notice that the battery level indicator is green instead of white. That’s how you’ll know your device is safe to use.
Image credit: SamMobile
Via: The Verge, Phandroid
Source: SamMobile
A tech accelerator grows in Brooklyn
At its peak, the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed as many as 70,000 people, building maritime vessels like the USS Maine, Missouri and Monitor. Military shipbuilding isn’t coming back to Brooklyn anytime soon, and neither are those particular jobs. But industry is returning to the borough — just not shipping in the military sense. Think more along the lines of product shipping, thanks to facilities like tech incubator New Lab. This is about more than giving startups a place to set up shop. New Lab is about building a community — not just to employ more New Yorkers, but to spur further innovation in one of the largest cities in the world.
New Lab isn’t like some other incubators you might be familiar with; you won’t find a bunch of software developers crammed into a tiny midtown office or suburban home. It’s a hardware accelerator, like HAX, which means that the tenants are focused on building physical products and bringing them to market. That presents different challenges than those a software startup might face: While an app developer can put together its project solely with a computer, hardware needs to be prototyped. That means a company needs machining equipment and plenty of space.
The latter is plentiful at New Lab, which is housed in an old shipbuilding facility — you can still see the cranes and rails from the structure’s former life, lurking in the rafters. Studios have been constructed across two floors, some appropriating existing office space while others are in new rooms that have been constructed whole cloth on the massive first floor. New Lab can house up to 50 companies, with more than 400 people working in the building. Right now there are 40 companies and 230 individuals calling New Lab their workplace.
Each company can customize its studio to its unique needs and specifications; some spaces have a workshop feel, while others have gone for a more traditional office environment. A lot of the freedom stems from the fact that New Lab has a lot of shared facilities so companies don’t have to worry about constructing their own. That includes obvious things like bathrooms, conference rooms and a café with a cafeteria space — handy in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a lot of shops or restaurants.
However, the most important shared facilities that New Lab offers are its various machining shops, containing equipment like 3D printers and laser cutters. The 3D printers range from the standard countertop models like MakerBot and Ultimaker to the large-scale BigRep that lives on the second floor. Some machines, like laser cutters, can be prohibitively expensive, so regular access to one with personnel and training to help you use it are a godsend to small businesses. (New Lab doesn’t have a water jet cutter yet, though.)
New Lab isn’t just about tangible benefits, however. It hosts regular “show and tell” sessions where creators talk about what they’re working on and solicit feedback from the other tenants. This kind of interaction not only leads to better products but also allows the various companies to collaborate on future projects, innovations that might not be possible if they worked separately.
It helps that the companies span a variety of disciplines and industries. The tenants include Waverly Labs, whose Pilot earpiece is a lot like the universal translator on Star Trek, helping you understand foreign languages on the go. In fact, a lot of the products coming out of New Lab feel like science fiction: StrongArm builds exoskeletons to help industrial workers carry heavy boxes, while BigRep’s 3D printers are big enough to print full-size chairs and tables, some of which furnish the building. Not to be outdone, some of the systems built by Honeybee Robotics have actually been to another planet — the company constructs components for the Mars rovers.
While the HAX accelerator is located in Shenzhen, to place startups closer to where their projects will be manufactured, New Lab’s location in the middle of New York City puts it closer to the consumers who will someday buy these products. The eventual goal is to have public events, where people can come and meet with the companies and attend panels, workshops and even screenings in New Lab’s large meeting space. Unfortunately, as an active industrial park, the Navy Yard is still closed to the public. But that is slowly changing — there’s a distillery at the yard that visitors can go to for tastings and tours, and Brooklyn Brewery is planning to open a beer garden there as well.
For now, New Lab is working on filling its few empty slots — and it’s not lacking for applicants. The current facility’s been operating for a few months in a sort of beta phase, but this week will mark its official grand opening. It will open its doors to the public for a bit of a block party from 7PM to 10PM this Saturday, where you can partake of food trucks and free beer, maybe while also checking out some cool NYC-based tech.
The FBI recommends you cover your laptop’s webcam, for good reason
FBI director James Comey recently recommended that we all cover our webcams with tape for security reasons. Comey believes that doing so is a simple step for people to “take responsibility for their own safety and security.”
Apparently Comey doesn’t want to be spied on. In questions during a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Comey revealed that cam-covering is commonplace at the FBI and other government offices. “It’s not crazy that the FBI Director cares about personal security as well,” he added. “If you go into any government office, we all have our little camera things that sit on top of the screen, they all have a little lid that closes down on them, you do that, so people who do not have authority don’t look at you, I think that’s a good thing.”
That the FBI’s director covers his cams may be a surprise to some, just as it was when people spotted Mark Zuckerberg’s webcam tape-over in a photo of his Facebook desk this spring.
But many of us who’ve been paying attention to cybercrime and punishment have been covering our webcams for years, and telling all our friends and family to do it, too. What’s more surprising is that it’s taken this long for officials and press to raise the alarm. I mean, they’re just a few years behind, but hey, it’s nice to know they care.
In 2010, a Pennsylvania school narrowly escaped criminal charges when it was caught secretly taking photos of students through the webcams on school-issued laptops. Harriton High School student Blake Robbins filed a civil suit and the FBI launched an investigation when he found out school employees had photographed him 400 times over a two-week period — sometimes when he was partially undressed or sleeping. School officials said its laptops had a tracking system for finding lost or stolen laptops, but admitted that the software program took images every 15 minutes, without telling the user. It turns out they’d snapped around 56,000 privacy-violating pictures of students.
Aside from institutional malfeasance, there’s been a thriving black market for compromised webcams and the video or photos they can produce, for many years. A clearly startled 2013 BBC reporter claimed the going price for access to a woman’s webcam was priced at $1 per girl, whereas computer webcams belonging to men cost $1 — for one hundred. And even then, three years ago, it was old news. The programs that capture images, take videos and record audio are not expensive, and they do their jobs surreptitiously by overriding the “record” light so victims don’t know they’re being spied on.
BBC’s story was sparked by a case involving a Miss Teen USA contestant. A year before Cassidy Wolf won the 2013 crown, a guy in her high school used a program to hack into the webcam on her computer and take photos of her. She found out when he got into her social media accounts and tried to extort money from her. It turns out that she was one of 12 girls he had taken photos of and threatened for cash. He was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.
The software is typically put on a computer when the victim clicks a link, often through an email, and they infect the computer with a program that hides while letting the computer’s camera be controlled remotely. Known as phishing, it’s the most common form of online hack attack.
The following year, the FBI ran its largest cyber operation to date, in 2014, arresting scores of webcam hackers in over a dozen countries, who had all been using a program called Blackshades. The program has the ability to give its user access to “photographs and other files on the victim’s computer, record all of the keystrokes entered on the victim’s keyboard, steal the passwords to the victim’s online accounts, and even activate the victim’s web camera to spy on the victim — all of which could be done without the victim’s knowledge.” The malicious tool was shown to have been purchased by several thousand hackers in over 100 countries, infecting more than half a million computers around the world.
After her harrowing experience, Ms. Wolf now tapes over all of her webcams, and so should we all. Everything has a camera. Your phone, your laptop, your tablet. If you have a modern device that can get online, it probably has a camera. And if it has a camera, someone looking for cash or scummy thrills has probably figured out how to hack it and turn it on without you knowing. Protecting yourself is as easy as taping it up, just like Zuck and Comey. Sticky notes work well because they have a gentle adhesive, and you can also find privacy stickers for purchase online that are made specifically for putting on (and taking off) web and phone cameras.
Perhaps what’s such a facepalm isn’t the irony of the FBI telling us how not to get spied on, or why cam-covering is such a wacky idea to Comey’s friends. It’s that the FBI is acknowledging to the public that, really, it’s ‘everyone for themselves’ when it comes to technology and personal security.
Which is how some of us have been proceeding all along.
Image: AP Photo/Richard Drew (Blackshades)
Google might introduce another WiFi router on October 4th
We’re less than two weeks away from Google’s big fall event in San Francisco, and we already have a good idea of what to expect — Pixel-branded smartphones, maybe Google Home, maybe a 4K-capable Chromecast. Android Police is offering up a new potential bit of hardware we haven’t heard about yet: a new router called Google WiFi.
If you’re keeping track at home, yes, Google already does have its own line of branded routers. The OnHub line launched late last summer as a router that’s simple to control with your smartphone and good looks that’ll make you want to place it prominently in your home. However, both of the two OnHub-branded routers were built by third party manufacturers (TP-Link and Asus).
This new Google WiFi router would be presumably built in-house, like the rest of the hardware that Google is set to introduced in October. Additionally, Android Police says that buying multiple routers (they are rumored to cost $129 a pop) would link together to create a mesh network, a nice feature for larger dwelling that are hard to blanket with WiFi signals.
It sounds like this router would be relatively small and unobtrusive as well, comparable in stature to Amazon’s Echo Dot. That means it would likely omit features like multiple Ethernet ports. The router is also rumored to have “smart” features, similar to what we see in the OnHub series. What those features will be remains to be seen, but the OnHub series works with Philips Hue lighting and IFTTT — not to mention its own excellent iOS and Android app for managing various settings.
This still seems like a strange pursuit with Google having launched OnHub last year, but on the other hand the company seems more and more keen these days to offer its own first-party hardware as much as it can. We’ll know if Google WiFi is for real in less than two weeks.
Source: Android Police
MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Wayfarer Leather Messenger Bag From Intrepid Bag Co
For the last few weeks, MacRumors has been running a special giveaway event, highlighting high-quality luxury bags from manufacturers like Pad & Quill, Intrepid Bag Co, Whipping Post, and Saddleback Leather Company, and now our event is coming to an end with one final giveaway from Intrepid Bag Co.
This week, we’re giving away Intrepid Bag Co.’s Wayfarer Leather Messenger Bag, which is superbly designed and undeniably stylish. Made from a thick full grain coffee-colored saddle leather, the Wayfarer Messenger Bag is big enough to hold a 15-inch MacBook Pro and it boasts the most pockets out of any of the bags we’ve given away while also being the most compact.
Measuring in at 16 inches wide by 12 inches tall by 4.5 inches deep, the Wayfarer Messenger Bag has a magazine pocket at the back, a large full-length front pocket, and an interior area featuring a padded MacBook pocket, two deep interior pockets, a main compartment, a pen pocket, a phone pocket, and a pocket with a clasp. The whole bag closes up with two front buckles so the contents stay secure during travel.
With all of the pockets and space inside the Wayfarer Messenger Bag, there was room to hold almost any Apple device and accessory I own (MacBook Pro, Retina MacBook, iPad Pro, iPad mini and iPhone), with leftover space for a lightweight hoodie, a water bottle, loose papers, two notebooks, three small books, and other small bits and bobs.
The Wayfarer Messenger Bag is super rigid and stiff when it arrives, but it should loosen up and wear in with usage, gaining its own unique, lived in look. Along with the aforementioned outside buckles, there’s an adjustable shoulder strap and a separate hand strap for carrying it around.
Intrepid Bag Co’s Messenger Bag was one of the neatest and sharpest I took a look at, with careful stitching, a herringbone lining, and copper accents. Intrepid Bag Co normally prices its Wayfarer Leather Messenger Bag at $469, but one MacRumors reader will win one for free.
To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winner and send the prize. You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.
Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.
a Rafflecopter giveawayThe contest will run from today (September 23) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on September 30. The winner will be chosen randomly on September 30 and will be contacted by email. The winner will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before a new winner is chosen.
Tags: giveaway, Intrepid Bag Co
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Second Wave iPhone 7 and 7 Plus Launch Kicks Off in Dozens of Countries Around the World
Following their September 16 debut in more than 25 countries around the world, the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus are seeing their second wave launch today, debuting in a number of additional countries across Europe and the Middle East.
The iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus are now available for purchase in the following locations: Andorra, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Greenland, Guernsey, Hungary, Iceland, Isle of Man, Jersey, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Maldives, Malta, Monaco, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
With today’s second wave launch, Apple’s latest devices have rolled out to more than 55 countries, and will expand to India in the near future with an October 7 launch date planned.
In many countries, supplies of the iPhone 7 and especially the iPhone 7 Plus are likely to be severely constrained, as Apple has been struggling to meet demand. In the United States, Apple had no iPhone 7 Plus stock available for walk-in customers on launch day, with all supplies having gone to pre-order customers.
Wait times are up to three to five weeks for the most popular iPhone models, like the Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus, in many countries, with lower two to three week shipping estimates for other devices.
The iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus feature better water resistance, much improved cameras (with a dual-camera for the 7 Plus), faster processors, brighter, more vivid displays, a redesigned Home button powered by a new Taptic engine and no headphone jack.
The Apple Watch Series 1, Apple Watch Series 2, and Apple Watch Edition are launching in new countries today as well, including Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Cayman Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guam, Hungary, Jersey, Kuwait, Macau, Monaco, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia and the US Virgin Islands.
Apple Watch Hermès Series 2 models are also available as of today in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Macau, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, UAE, the UK and the US.
Related Roundups: Apple Watch Series 2, watchOS 3, iPhone 7
Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Buy Now)
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UPS Working to Expedite iPhone 7 Deliveries Following Weather and Mechanical Delays
Yesterday, we reported that some iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus shipments have experienced irregular movement or delays during delivery between China or South Korea and their final destinations in the United States.
UPS has since confirmed to MacRumors that a small number of deliveries were impacted due to a mechanical problem and weather delay, while it is still investigating the reason for erroneous tracking notices.
UPS experienced a mechanical problem on one flight and a weather delay on another flight containing iPhones. The cargo was redirected, but not in time to avoid minor delays in residential deliveries of these packages. None of the phones were returned to their origin or routed on extraneous legs of the journey to their final destination.
We are still investigating the reason for the erroneous tracking notices. When the packages receive their next physical scan at a UPS facility, the ups.com tracking information will be updated to reflect the next planned delivery date. UPS is working to expedite these deliveries as rapidly as possible. The updated delivery date may be improved and another status update posted. To be informed of latest status, consumers can request text or email notification by selecting the “Notify me with Updates” feature when tracking their shipment on ups.com.
Apple began accepting iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus pre-orders on September 9, and it took less than 20 minutes for supplies of popular models to begin selling out. iPhone 7 Plus and Jet Black models have been most constrained, but some customers originally quoted October to November delivery dates for Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus models have seen their orders ship sooner than expected.
Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tag: UPS
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Apple Watch Series 2: A Swimmer’s Perspective
As a lifelong swimmer, I found the addition of 50-meter water resistance and swim workout tracking in the Apple Watch Series 2 to be a welcome improvement that made the new watch a must-have upgrade for me. While the original Apple Watch was not rated for swimming, many users had no issues regularly using it in the water, although its lack of built-in swim tracking features limited its usefulness.
With Apple Watch Series 2, Apple has not only upgraded the water resistance with new gaskets and seals to make it suitable for swimming, but added new Pool Swim and Open Water Swim workouts to help track your progress. As part of the Apple Watch Series 2 introduction earlier this month, Apple highlighted how it worked with swimmers in the company’s fitness labs to develop the software to accurately track swim workouts, from using the accelerometer in the watch to measure arm movements to tracking energy expenditures during workouts.
So how well does the new Apple Watch work when you take it for some swims in a pool? Let’s take a look.
Getting Started
Swim tracking is managed in the same Workout app as other types of exercise, with both pool and open water swim workout options to choose from and a variety of different goals available for each workout.
When you launch a pool swim workout from the Apple Watch, the first screen lets you input the length of the pool you’re going to be swimming in. The default value in the U.S. is 25 yards, which is the most common pool length, but you can adjust this manually down to the exact yard as needed. A force press on the screen lets you change between yards and meters.
The next screen is where you set your goal for the workout. As with other types of workouts, you can swipe left and right on the watch to choose between calories burned, time or distance, or simply set an open goal. If you’ve previously completed swim workouts, the watch displays your best performances for each of the metrics, giving you a reference for setting new goals.
In the Pool
Once you’ve selected your pool length and workout goal, you’re ready to go. Hit the Start button and the watch will give you a three-second countdown and you’re off.
During your swim workout, the Apple Watch can display up to four different metrics. By default, these include workout duration, active calories burned, laps completed, and distance. Using the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, however, you can customize the display to rearrange the order of the different metrics or replace some of them with other options including average pace, total calories burned, and heart rate. Alternatively, you can set your Apple Watch to display only a single metric at a time and use the Digital Crown to change metrics during the workout.
One unique aspect to swim workouts is that once the workout begins, the Apple Watch screen automatically locks to prevent accidental taps that can occur as water interferes with the touch sensing. If you want to pause your workout at any point, simply press the Digital Crown and the side button simultaneously. Pressing them again resumes the workout tracking.
As detailed during its introduction earlier this month, the Apple Watch Series 2 has a clever feature to help clear water from its speaker, using vibrations of the speaker itself to expel water from the speaker cavity when your workout is complete. Once your workout is paused and you’re finished, turning the Digital Crown expels the water from the speaker and unlocks the screen, which then allows you to swipe right and end the workout, resume the workout, or re-lock the display.
How Well Does It Work?
So how well does the swim workout tracking work? The answer is very well if your goal is to simply swim back and forth to rack up yardage. The watch accurately senses individual strokes and both open turns and flip turns at the ends of the pool to calculate the distance you’ve traveled, elapsed time, and calories burned, and I found the active calories burned metric calculated by the watch to be close to figures estimated by other sources for various types of swimming activity.
Apple notes that the heart rate sensor may not function properly during swimming activities as water may interfere with the measurements, but that calories burned continue to be estimated using the watch’s accelerometer. In my experience, however, the heart rate sensor continued to function very well in the water, accurately capturing my heart rate throughout my workouts.
Where the Apple Watch’s swim tracking starts to fall short is for people looking to do more varied swim workouts based around swim sets and focused exercises like stroke drills and kicking. The Apple Watch’s tracking is linked to its ability to sense arm motion, which means if you’re doing a kick set, it won’t pick it up at all. Or if you’re doing specialized drills to work on your technique, such as one-arm strokes, if may not track accurately if you don’t have a regular stroke rhythm.
The Apple Watch’s pace calculation also becomes less useful if you’re doing interval-based sets, as it’s simply going to tell you the interval you were going on instead of your actual swimming pace unless you manually pause the workout as you finish each repeat and resume before starting the next one. That quickly becomes tedious, especially as I found myself having to visually check the watch’s screen each time to make sure it was pausing and resuming correctly, as pressing the crown and side button didn’t always register properly.
It would be great if the watch could sense when I’ve stopped at the wall to rest and automatically pause my workout and then resume once I push off the wall on my next swim. It obviously starts to get tricky differentiating random arm movements while resting from the start of a new swim with only an accelerometer to go on, but I feel like there could be some improvements made here.
I’d also love a way to edit workouts after the fact to include untracked activities such as kick sets and drills, even if it’s just adding in the yardage. For now, I’m using a third-party app like MyFitnessPal to create a second workout to estimate my calories burned for the portions of my workouts the Apple Watch can’t track.
Finishing Up Your Workout
At the end of your workout, the Apple Watch app displays a summary of your session, including the time of day the activity took place, dominant stroke used, distance, workout time, pool length, laps completed, average pace, average heart rate, and both active and total calories burned, as well as the weather at your location.
All of that data gets synced over to the Activity app on your iPhone, where it’s visible in the Workouts tab. A bonus view on the iPhone lets you break down the average pace number and see your pace for each 100-yard segment of the workout. And of course the exercise and calorie data also automatically syncs over to the Health app on the iPhone, as well as third-party apps hooked into HealthKit, to help track your overall health status.
Open Water Swimming
Aside from pool swims, the Apple Watch Series 2 can also track open water swims in the Workout app. I’m not as much of a fan of open water swimming and so I haven’t had a chance to test that function out, but it operates in a similar fashion to pool workouts, allowing you to set a goal for time, distance, or calories, or leave an open goal.
As with pool swims, you can customize the metrics shown on the Apple Watch’s display during a workout using the Apple Watch app on your iPhone. The default metrics are duration, active calories, burned, average pace, and distance, but these can be rearranged or swapped out for total calories burned and heart rate metrics from your iPhone.
Once you hit “Start” it will track your swimming progress, and as long as you are using a freestyle stroke it will use GPS to plot your location and speed while the accelerometer tracks your calories burned. Once your open water swim is completed, you can view a map of your route within the Workout entry in the Activity app on your phone.
Wrap-up
Plenty of serious and not-so-serious swimmers and triathletes already wear fitness watches to track their workouts, but this is my first foray into wrist-worn swim tracking. I like the tracking the Apple Watch can provide in pool swims to help keep tabs on my yardage, heart rate, and calories burned, and it’s something I’ll likely continue playing with. It’s great for tracking long workouts with a minimum of stopping.
If you’re doing sets of short swims or varied sets involving drills or kicking, it can be frustrating to have that activity go untracked or to have to manage pausing and unpausing the tracking to separate swimming from resting intervals. Frequent focusing on the watch to ensure it’s tracking accurately and at the right times can also divert your attention from the actual swimming, although that will likely improve over time as I gain familiarity with using the watch in the pool.
For those reasons, the Apple Watch Series 2 may not yet become an everyday swim tracker for me, although I’ll keep experimenting with it to figure out the best way to incorporate it into my workouts to provide the best data with minimum disruption to my workout focus.
Where the new Apple Watch could be a major benefit, however, is for open water swimmers. The lengthy freestyle swims are ideal for tracking with the Apple Watch, and the watch’s GPS should make it a great tool for tracking those lake and ocean swims where it’s difficult to estimate how far you’ve swum. It’s certainly not the first GPS swim tracking watch, but for open water swimmers it’s a great addition to an Apple Watch they can wear throughout the day to provide a host of other functions.
Related Roundups: Apple Watch Series 2, watchOS 3
Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Buy Now)
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