Speaker 1: Hey everybody. We're here off the coast of beautiful Catalina, checking out the Apple Watch Ultra and the Oceanic Plus dive app that turns it into a dive computer, dive planner, dive tracker, and much more. Without further ado, let's dive in.
Speaker 1: The Apple Watch Ultra is the newest watch in Apple's lineup featuring a more rugged design [00:00:30] and longer battery life. It's made with adventurous types in mind. The Ultra also marks Apple's first Poe into dive tech. In order to break into this new category, they've partnered with Huish Outdoors, a company with decades of experience in the dive tech arena. The result is the subscription based Oceanic Plus app, which aims to make the Apple Watch ultra competitive with dive computers, an important piece of gear which measures a diver's depth and duration at depth making calculations to help them stay safe from the dangers of decompression sickness. I tested a pre-release [00:01:00] beta version of the Oceanic Plus app with free dives off of Catalina, California. I'm a relatively green diver and stayed well within my own limits and those of the Apple Watch Ultra. I'll focus on the experience of using the app from pre dive planning through the post dive data summaries, showing you the good, the not so good, and the quirky. I'll also share a bit about my experience testing the free snorkel mode within Oceanic Plus and how it compares with the Apple Watch Ultras built in depth app. I'll leave timestamps in the description if you'd like to skip around. Now [00:01:30] let's get started Planning our day of diving in Catalina.
Speaker 1: There are two ways to plan your dive with the Oceanic Plus app from the watch or from your iPhone. The watch offers a simple NOCO dive planner where you can enter your air mix and time until your next dive. To calculate how long you can stay at various depths without the need for a decompression stop. The iPhone app offers a location planner in addition to the NOCO planner where you can enter your dive site or drop a pin and get weather, water, temperature, and ti information up to three days in [00:02:00] advance. You can set alarms for dive time, target depth, no deco time and minimum temperature. You can also add various shortcuts to the watch face called complications, which can take you directly to various parts of the Oceanic Plus dive app. To compliment the ultra Apple made and Elast or watch band specifically for water sports called the Ocean Band.
Speaker 1: It's well-engineered, secure, comfortable, and fits well over a wetsuit or gloves. However, if you set up the Ultra with a passcode like I did, the sensor on the back might not detect your wrist through [00:02:30] the wet suer gloves prompting you to unlock the watch anytime you need to do anything. Now let's see what it's like actually diving with the Apple Watch Ultra. I set my Apple Watch Ultra to automatically launch scuba mode on the Oceanic Plus app when submerged. While in scuba mode, your depth and no deco time always remain at the top of the screen, except in the case of warnings and alarms, which I'll get to in a little bit. The information at the bottom of the screen cycles through four different configurations as you move the digital crown. On the primary screen, you'll see your dive time [00:03:00] minutes to surface and water temperature.
Speaker 1: On the second screen, you'll find your max depth ascent speed and battery level. On the third screen, you'll find the compass, and on the fourth screen you'll find your air information, conservatism, gas mix, and other parameters you set during your dive planning. The 360 degree style compass is intuitive to use. You set a heading by pressing the action button once set blue arrows on either side of the compass tell you how far off you are from that heading. The screen is the largest in the Apple Watch lineup, but still small when compared to my buddy's dive [00:03:30] computer. Scrolling through the various screens with the digital crown was doable in gloves, but I sometimes found myself scrolling past the screen I was trying to reach by accident. I set a target depth for some of our dives and was able to feel the buzz of the notification through the gloves I was wearing.
Speaker 1: The yellow notifications for both target depth and a safety stop begin by taking up the full screen. They shrink in size after a few seconds and can be minimized by pressing the action button during one of our safety stops. I noticed that moving the watch up and down from 19 to 20 feet depth [00:04:00] turned the safety stop warning on and off. Though it never restarted the three minute timer from the beginning, which was appreciated, I've heard that other dive computers will simply prompt you that you're too deep for your safety stop and need to ascend. There's also a warning for minimum temperature and red alerts for when you're ascending too fast or when you hit maximum operating depth. The rent alerts cannot be dismissed and require the diver to take immediate action. As you ascend, the depth gauge on the side starts to get redder and redder as you approach the excessive ascent rate limit.
Speaker 1: I only [00:04:30] triggered the excessive ascent rate once during my day of diving by accident. I felt the buzz on my wrists and by the time I stopped ascending to look at the watch, the warning was gone on my second dive of the day. A few features of the Apple Watch Ultra and Oceanic Plus app combined for a slightly frustrating experience. The beta version of the Oceanic Plus app I was using automatically provided post dive data immediately after surfacing a nice idea. In theory, however, on this particular dive, I must have triggered the post dive data summary before actually descending perhaps [00:05:00] when letting air out of my buoyancy control device to descend at depth. I realized the watch wasn't in scuba mode, but was stuck showing me a post dive summary because the Apple Watch Ultras water lock disables the touchscreen I had to surface, undo the water lock and then used the touchscreen to start diving again.
Speaker 1: However, because the watch didn't register as being worn on my wrist due to the gloves I was wearing, I also had to input a passcode to use the touchscreen. Even with my wet gloves, I was able to use the touchscreen to input my passcode [00:05:30] and get the dive started manually by pressing the dive now button on the Oceanic Plus app. There you go. I am ready to dive. According to this video from Oceanic, there's supposed to be a five minute window before the dive is officially ended, or you can edit yourself by pressing the action button. I never saw this screen while diving, so hopefully this is something that'll be fixed in future updates on my third and final dive of the day, I compared the Oceanic Plus app to a wrist worn dive computer as well as as the dive computer built into my regulator, so you can see [00:06:00] how much of the same information is displayed in different ways. Now let's move on to the post dive summary.
Speaker 1: Divers log their dives to track their experience and the Oceanic Plus app makes this easy by creating post dive summaries with all the information you might want in your log book. As with the dive planning, the post dive info on the watch is simpler than the detailed version you get in the iPhone app. The watch shows a depth graph and basic information. The iPhone app shows graphs for depth, temperature, ascent [00:06:30] speeds, and no deco time. You can also leave notes in the iPhone app about visibility, surface conditions, currents, gear used, dive buddies and more. You can see here the accidental or false dives where the dive summary was triggered at the beginning of my dive rather than at the end, but it's easy enough to delete them after the fact. The watch also calculates your no-fly time because flying at high altitudes after scuba diving can cause decompression sickness just like ascending to fast can the watch itself held up very well after [00:07:00] a day in the ocean, even after bumping up against the rest of my scuba gear, after 15 hours of use in three dives, I put it back on the charger and the battery was still half full.
Speaker 1: The Apple Watch Ultra will cost you about $800 and a subscription to the scuba version of the Oceanic Plus app will cost you $80 a year, $10 a month, or $5 a day. The app also has a free snorkeling mode, which I tried out back at my apartment's pool, got the Apple Watch Ultra here with the Oceanic Plus app set to snorkel mode. Let's hop in [00:07:30] this cold pool and see what kind of data it gives
Speaker 2: Us.
Speaker 1: I think that's about enough of that. So as you can see on the watch right here, we've got max depth. The length of time that your snorkel session has been the length of your last dive, the number of dives and the temperature of the water, which in this pool here we've got it about 56 degrees, [00:08:00] so there's also a second screen that displays a compass, but I was a little bit too cold in that pool to notice it. Now we'll try the Depth app and see how that differs from the Oceanic Plus Snorkel app. So the Depth app gives pretty similar data to the snorkel version [00:08:30] of the Oceanic Plus app. It gives you your max depth, your underwater time, and the water temperature, which is still 56 degrees. So I think it's about time to wrap this up. Overall, the free snorkel mode is a nice way to track dives and get a glimpse of how the Oceanic Plus app works, but it doesn't offer a whole lot more than the Apple Watch Ultra's built in depth app. The star of the Oceanic Plus app is clearly its scuba features.
Speaker 1: It's clear that the Apple Watch Ultra and Oceanic Plus app are designed to be [00:09:00] used alongside backup devices. This is likely part liability management and part common sense since experienced divers will tell you that backups are always important to have when diving during my mostly shallow dives. The Ultra definitely felt like a smart watch, which sometimes made it difficult to use as a dive computer. For example, most dive computers don't have a touchscreen or a water lock and they don't require a passcode. I hope to keep diving with this watch and I'd be interested to see if and how Apple and Huish outdoors address any shortcomings in future updates. [00:09:30] I'd also like to see if other diving tools could be added to the Oceanic Plus app. For example, wireless air integration, which tells the diver how much air they have left. Considering Huish Outdoors already makes dive computers with that feature. Thanks so much to my dive support team. Camera operator, Aaron Brian, dive instructor. Kaylene, can we Blue Hall Scuba and the crew of the Sun Diver Express without whom this day of diving would not have been possible.
