Three reasons to buy Apple Watch Series 5 and two reasons not to

Apple has introduced its Series 5 watch last week. You can pre-order it now in selected countries on apple.com, with actual availability starting at the end of this week. Its clear the Cupertino-based outfit has put a lot of thought on how to create a device that takes full advantage of new WatchOS 6 features.

Essential reading: Top fitness trackers and health gadgets

What follows is our list of three reasons to buy Apple’s latest toy and two reasons not to.

Always-on display

Last year the big news was the 30% larger edge-to-edge screen, this year it’s the always-on display. Its been a long time coming and Apple is playing catch up to some other products out there, but it’s finally here.

This means the ‘raise to wake’ functionality no longer exists in the same form. Now, when you lower your wrist your watch will dim but still stay on. A function that is particularly useful for workouts. Raise it and the 1000-nits OLED display will fully light up.

Apple has introduced a new LPTO (low-temperature polysilicone and oxide) technology to achieve this. The display refreshes automatically within the 60Hz (full brightness) to 1Hz (low brightness) range. In more simple language, the display rendering changes depending on the position of your wrist, all the way up to 60 images per second.

For now native apps have been adjusted to take advantage of the new display. Third-party apps will, no doubt, follow suit.

Feature-rich fitness tracking device

Apple has made significant improvements last year to the accelerometer and gyroscope. This improved performance has allowed the Cupertino outfit to come up with some clever features such as incident detection. This functionality has now been extended to more countries.

There is, of course, the ECG sensor and almost everything you need for tracking your fitness around the clock. Series 5 also slaps on a compass and current elevation feature to help users better navigate their day.

Performance improvements

Powering everything is a fifth generation SIP called S5. This contains a dual core 64-bit processor customized by Apple to bring 2 times faster performance than S3 (includes W3 wireless chip). There’s also a new display driver, ambient light sensor and integrated power management circuit.

The final performance improvement is to do with storage. This has been bumped up from 16Gb on the previous models to 32 GB.

Same battery life

It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out the bad news. Yes, Apple has kept battery life the same (18 hours) so you will be charging on a daily basis.

In a sense, that’s not really surprising considering the new always-on display. But battery life is perhaps the feature that most consumers want so it remains an issue for potential buyers.

No sleep tracking

The Cupertino outfit has opted to leave out the sleep tracking functionality for another year. It would be kind of pointless introducing it considering most people will still opt to recharge their device during the night. Here’s to 2020 and Apple Watch Series 6.

Price is a key factor when deciding on a smartwatch, and because of this many users tend to choose older generations. And Series 3 has now come down in price significantly.

So which will you opt for? Are the above reasons enough to convince you to shell out for Apple’s priciest wearable?

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