Do I really need Ultra 3 ?

[chiefs1968]

BestBuy had a discounted sale on new Ultra 2 for $549.00 and was debating on 2 or 3 and finally made decision to get the Ultra 2.
I felt that my Iphone has satelite capability and the likely chance of ever using satelite is minute especially on my watch but other than that the 3 does not have major upgrades that will wow my eyes. Happy with the 2 and it's serving me well.

 

[uknation87]

I recently upgraded from the S10 46mm to the Ultra 3 and have zero regrets.

This is my first experience with an Ultra watch so it’s a worthy upgrade in my opinion but I don’t think you can go wrong with the Ultra 2 as it’s a beast of a watch and almost identical internally.

 

[chiefs1968]

I recently upgraded from the S10 46mm to the Ultra 3 and have zero regrets.

This is my first experience with an Ultra watch so it’s a worthy upgrade in my opinion but I don’t think you can go wrong with the Ultra 2 as it’s a beast of a watch and almost identical internally.

Enjoy ....you got yourself a great watch

 

[stanza.richi]

If I could afford it, I always choose the newest one: more future proof.

 

[spartan1967]

Depends on what you had before. If you can find an AW10 with cellular on sale, it’s by far the best bang for your buck.

 

[doogm]

After upgrading from the first Ultra, I'm glad to have the Ultra 3, mostly for the better always-on display (e.g., information that upgrades each second when AOD has dimmed the screen.)

I may never use the Satellite features, but I only used it once with my phone, this past summer, and it was just to send a message to my wife that really wasn't that critical. That said, I do go out on solo runs and on hikes almost every day of the week, we live in an area with bad cellular connectivity (hence the use of satellite messaging), so I'm glad to have it on more than one device.

All that said: if I had an Ultra 2 rather than an Ultra, I definitely would not have upgraded. I did so mostly because the battery was getting bad.

 

[McScooby]

If I could afford it, I always choose the newest one: more future proof.

Still with WiFi4 was a hard pass for me, I elected for the cheaper S11 & will get an ultra next year if they upgrade it.

 

[cynics]

Still with WiFi4 was a hard pass for me, I elected for the cheaper S11 & will get an ultra next year if they upgrade it.

Meh, wouldn't worry about that too much.

The iApple Watch prioritizes a single stream 2.4ghz for battery. And it scales power to the radio to prioritize the battery even more. New protocols get their throughput from MMO, a single stream on Wifi 6 would be a theoretical max of ~140Mbps / 17.5MB/s. So realistically half of that, and what do you know.....



That's about what I currently get. Btw that's activity monitor during the process of sending shared cache from my watch to Xcode, takes a while so I end up staring at it.

So using a newer wifi protocol would need multi stream (MMO) but that uses significantly more power (relatively speaking). New protocols use higher frequencies which multiplies RF transmit power 2 - 2.5x per stream and we need to add some for the speed.

The problem is the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The tiny nand controller is throttled due to a power limit. You get a 100 MB/s write for a few seconds and then its around 35MB/s.

On top of all of that the internet is telling me 5-10% of data transfer is done over wifi. the other 90-95% is done via Bluetooth. Obviously there can be a lot of variables there,

Samsung hasn't done it yet and they will sell on specs even at the expense of the user experience. That should say something.