I am an Apple fanboy, having many of their products, but I was hesitating for a long time in purchasing their watches as the short battery life has always out me off. Eventually after years of procrastination I took the plunge - resulting in this review.
The Apple Watch SE does everything I want from such a product and overall I am very happy with it. Granted, battery life still sucks, at most I can squeeze out 2 days and a bit per charge, using it only for the barest of things such as glancing at the time occasionally or checking for messages. No fancy fitness tracking etc., and even with WiFi turned off.
I would love to give it a full 5 star but one overriding shortcoming is the very dim display within dark environments. The auto-brightness feature cannot be turned off (as opposed to iPhones and iPads), and the employed algorithm to regulate the brightness is way too agressive biased towards saving battery life at the expense of legibility of the watch in dark scenarios.
This shortfall is well known beginning with Apple Watch Series 5, and has carried over to the SE and Series 6 models as well. Countless disgruntled users on various online forums ask for the same thing: "Apple, please give us a switch to disable auto-brightness, or some other means to set a higher brightness level at low lights". So far Apple decided to ignore these calls, and one can only hope that with a future Watch OS release there will be a fix for this.
In summary: if you wear glasses and want to check the time at night in your bedroom, you will struggle without glasses to make out the current time. Therefore, one of the most needed and wanted features of any smart watch is a big fail with the latest Apple watches!
Compare Apple Watch products
| Price | From: $477.00 | From: $599.00 | From: $334.00 |
| Ratings | (50) | (65) | (22) |
| Case Size | 44mm, 40mm | 45mm, 41mm | 42mm, 38mm |
| Case Thickness | 10.4mm | 10.4mm | 11.4mm |
| Display | Retina display 30% larger than Series 3 | Always-On Retina display. Nearly 20% more screen area than Apple Watch SE and over 50% more screen area than Series 3 | Retina display |
| Processor | 64-bit dual-core S5 processor Up to 2x faster than S3 processor | 64-bit dual-core S6 processor Up to 20 per cent faster than S5 | Dual-core S3 processor |
| Optical Heart Sensor | Second-generation optical heart sensor | Second-generation optical heart sensor | Optical heart sensor |
| Digital Crown | Digital Crown with haptic feedback | Digital Crown with haptic feedback | Digital Crown |
| Altimeter | Always-on Altimeter | Always-on Altimeter | Altimeter |
| Speaker | 50% louder than Series 3 | 50% louder than Series 3 |
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| Compass |
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| Noise Monitoring |
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| Blood oxygen sensor (Blood Oxygen app) |
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| Electrical heart sensor (ECG app) |
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| Capacity | 32GB | 32GB | 8GB |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 5.0 | Bluetooth 5.0 | Bluetooth 4.2 |
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Reviewed in Australia on 27 August 2021
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Colour Name: Space Grey/MidnightSize Name: 40mm - fits 130–200mm wristsStyle Name: GPS + CellularVerified Purchase
