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Apple WatchOS 2 packs lots of cool updates

Apple revealed the new WatchOS 2 at WWDC 2015, which packs plenty of interesting new features into your Apple Watch including improved fitness support, Siri support for sending messages with your voice and a new Time Travel function. Here’s the biggest changes.

The standard watch face has been updated quite a lot in WatchOS 2. For instance, Photo Face allows you to make a wallpaper out of any photo in your gallery – or you can even have a slideshow as your Watch background, if you can’t choose just one. And the Watch’s new time-lapse face shows you an actual time lapse video of some awesome locations around the UK as your background, including the likes of London and Hong Kong.

Or, if you’d rather display some important info on your watch face, Apple’s new Complications update allows you to stream all kinds of data. That includes smart home info such as your house temperature, meeting info and so on.

And with Time Travel, you can see info on future events by scrolling with the Watch’s dial. So, like with Pebble Time, you can check out future appointments and so on right there on the standard watch face.

Interestingly, Time Travel can also predict how much battery life you’ll have later in the day, so you know if you need to charge your Watch before heading on a trip.

There’s also a new night mode which shows the time in a sideways orientation when your watch is laid down. So you can glance across to your nightstand at 3am and see how many more sleepless hours until you have to get up for work. Yay.

WatchOS 2 allows you to reply to emails as well as read them, using just your voice. Just say what you want to send and Siri will display the message on screen before sending. And FaceTime audio is also supported, so you can enjoy high fidelity calls right there on your wrist.

Fitness features have also been updated. Siri can be used to start and track workouts now, with just a quick command. Achievements will pop right up on the Watch screen when you unlock them and you can feed in session info such as distance and time using just your voice.

Apple Watch now also supports the new Transit maps, giving you step-by-step directions to using public transport to get to your destination, complete with visual maps on the watch face.

Apple WatchOS 2 is coming soon, via an update, to existing watches.

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