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Apple Daily: Apple Watch Essentially Waterproof, Contains Unused Blood Oxygen Monitor
// MacLife
At last, after years of speculation that Apple was designing a smartwatch of its own, the device is at last here and on our wrists. And now that we can get a better look at the device, details previously undisclosed by Apple are starting to emerge. In today's Apple Daily, for instance, we learn that the Apple Watch is effectively waterproof, and that the highly anticipated wearable has an unactivated device installed for measuring your blood oxygen.
Apple Watch Subjected to Extreme Water Tests, Comes Out Unscathed
While most new Apple Watch owners were busy loading their devices with new apps this morning, the folks over at Australia's FoneFox were busy dunking it in buckets of water and taking showers with it. And good thing, too. Thanks to their efforts, we know that all that talk about the Apple Watch being merely "water resistant" rather than waterproof was largely legal-safe downplaying of the device's true potential.
FoneFox conducted the experiments with a 38mm Apple Watch Sport, which easily survived the first tests that include light splashing and a five-minute simulated showers with both soap and water. Seemingly miraculously, the device emerged with "absolutely no issues whatsoever."
Naturally, that meant it was time to up the ante on the punishment meted out on the new wearable by leaving it submerged in a bucket of water for five minutes. Yep, it came out fine. After that, the team at FoneFox took a swim with the device on for 15 minutes, after which the swimmer emerged to find it worked as well as it had when they'd first handled it this morning. The only complication was some poor responsiveness on the part of the touchscreen when the device was underwater. All things considered, the device passed the tests perfectly.
It's worth noting that, despite the official claims of the device being merely "water resistant," Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that he'd worn the Apple Watch in a shower as early as February without adverse effects.
Apple Watch Contains Inactive Blood Oxygen Monitor
The Apple Watch's surprising degree of "water resistance" isn't the only aspect of the Apple Watch that Apple's being humble about. As discovered by iFixit in its teardown, the device also has a sensor that's capable of measuring your blood oxygen, but Apple currently has it deactivated. So far, the Apple Watch only uses it to monitor your heart rate.
"Apple's heart rate monitor is actually a plethysmograph — it looks and acts like a pulse oximeter," iFixit says in its video.
It's not exactly a groundbreaking feature; after all, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and other smartphones from the Korean company already have a similar monitor installed. Much like Samsung's, Apple's sensor calculating the amount of oxygen in your blood by determining how much infrared light it absorbs.
Current speculation about why the monitor is switched off runs the gamut from concerns about the sensors being too inaccurate (as per a Wall Street Journal report from February) to Apple's possible wariness about drawing too much attention from the FDA. Considering the way the device's capabilities might have been scaled back from the initial rumors, it's almost certainly the latter.
Follow this article's writer, Leif Johnson, on Twitter.
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