Apple Watches have already been quite solid at telling you all the basic details, like how much you have moved, how well you slept, and whether your health metrics are a bit abnormal. The next step is helping you decide what to do with all that information.
Announced at Apple’s September 9 event, the new health features include Readiness and Health Age metrics, alongside improved heart-rate monitoring on the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4. The additions move Apple closer to the recovery and longevity-focused experiences offered by Whoop, Garmin, and Oura, while building on the health tools already available across Apple Watch and the iPhone Health app.
The new Readiness feature evaluates activity, sleep, and vital statistics to provide a clearer picture of how prepared your body is for the day. This makes it easier to understand when to push for an intense workout and when recovery is more important. Apple already offers Vitals, which compares overnight health measurements with your personal baseline, and Training Load, which helps you understand the intensity and duration of recent workouts. Readiness adds a more direct recovery-focused layer to that existing information, bringing the experience closer to what dedicated fitness wearables have offered for years.
Apple has even improved the hardware behind it. The Series 12 introduces more continuous background heart-rate monitoring, while the Ultra 4 features upgraded heart-rate sensing and more frequent heart-rate variability measurements. In practice, these changes can provide richer information for understanding recovery and longer-term trends. However, the accuracy of Apple’s new scoring system will need independent testing.
The more interesting long-term addition is Health Age. Rather than concentrating only on today’s activity, the feature is intended to help users understand how their health changes over time. It puts Apple into a category where Whoop has already made considerable progress with Healthspan and Pace of Aging.
In our Whoop 5.0 review, we found Healthspan particularly useful because it connects measurements such as sleep, activity, and fitness with an estimated physiological age and longer-term trends. So the appeal of this in Apple’s ecosystem is obvious. It gives users a way to see whether their habits are moving them in a healthier direction, rather than only sticking to an ambiguous daily score on the dashboard.
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.
Samsung's next budget fitness tracker may look a lot like its predecessor. Although the company has yet to share any details about the device, Android Authority has obtained videos showing the Galaxy Fit 4 in three colors, offering a closer look at a wearable that appears to retain the same basic design as the Galaxy Fit 3.
Samsung may be playing it safe with its next fitness band