Screen Time - Apple Watch Series 5

The best smartwatch around cements its place at the top with some key improvements

The Apple Watch Series 5 takes everything that made the Series 4 so good, sprinkles on a few extra features, and then cruelly replaces it with this superior model.

The stand-out new feature is an always-on screen, which means you don’t have to raise your wrist for the screen to show something: it will still show your watch face or workout at all times, just dimmed. New screen tech, a low-power display controller and S5 processor that has all kinds of extra power management features all combine to mean that the Watch’s screen can run a refresh rate of just once per second (rather than the usual 60 times per second of most screens) and be powered at all times without killing battery life.

In practice, what it means is that when you raise your wrist to look at the screen, you can get the display at full speed and full brightness. When you lower your wrist, the brightness drops along with the frame rate, and any large areas of bright colors on your watch face are also switched out to black. It means you can read the watch in awkward situations more easily, and others can see your face style at all times. It’s not a huge change, but once you’ve used it, being without feels so old-fashioned.