The Apple Watch 8 offers a slight variation on a winning theme

Apple announced its latest smartwatch, the Apple Watch Series 8, last week at its “Far Out” event in Cupertino. As new Apple Watches go, the 8 is just an incremental improvement over its predecessor, last year’s Apple Watch 7. But the new features may be meaningful for some people, and you get them for the same price as last year’s model.

The Series 8 starts at $399. It looks identical to the Series 7, and its battery is the same size.

What is different is under the hood. The Series 8 gets a couple of new sensors—an improved accelerometer and a gyroscope. Apple added a new High-G accelerometer to enable the new crash detection feature, which can identify when you’ve been in an auto accident and will automatically call for help. (I wasn’t able to test the feature without incurring a serious injury, but I have no doubt it works as billed.)

In addition, there’s a new temperature sensor, which supports the new retrospective-ovulation-estimates feature in the Cycle Tracking app. This sensor also can be used in the sleep tracking app for measuring your body temperature while you sleep. I sometimes wake up in a sweat, and I don’t know why. But I’d like to know when it happens so that I can try to connect it with possible causes (diet, stress, etc.).

The Apple Watch 8 also has a new chip, the S8 SiP, which I found to have an overall positive effect on the responsiveness of the touch screen for navigation and speedy app launching.

The best new features in the Apple Watch 8 are software features in watchOS 9. Among the most important is a new low-power mode, a software innovation that can stretch the device’s battery life from 18 hours to 36 hours. This mode shuts some features off, such as the always-on display, but I found this to be a worthwhile trade-off. The watch’s normal 18-hour battery life span, and the need to charge every night or morning, has always cramped my style a bit.

A completely redesigned compass app includes a new feature called Backtrack, in which your watch automatically drops GPS markers along your way as you travel somewhere. If you get lost, the watch can guide you way back to these little GPS breadcrumbs so you can find your way home, even without a cellular connection. Or you can manually drop the markers at certain places along your route. I tested this on my daily route to the coffee shop in my neighborhood, then followed the waypoints back home. On the screen of the watch, I could see when I was moving closer or farther away from a given waypoint. When I reached one, I’d head toward the next, and soon I was home. The interface made sense to me and was easy to use. The real test, however, is how well Backtrack works when I’m well off the grid with no cellular and with only spotty line-of-sight contact with GPS satellites.

The Apple Watch 8 is a very solid and mature piece of hardware. You know what you’re getting and everything works. Still, unless you have a very old Apple Watch and have been planning to upgrade anyway, I see no good reason to rush out and upgrade to the Apple Watch 8. The new features are meaningful additions to the growing sensing and processing power of the watch, and it’s good that Apple decided not to pass the cost on to the consumer.

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