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- Great price
- Nearly as good as the Series 11
- Stuffed with features
- Battery life is poor
The Apple Watch SE 3 is – like the AirPods Pro 3 – a bit of a hidden gem. I say that in the full knowledge that everyone knows about it, and that it isn’t really hidden. What I mean to say is that it is one of those products that doesn’t really get talked about in the kind of breathless terms that the latest flagship smartphones or luxury wearables do. It exists, and that’s all most people seem to care about.
But given the rather incremental – and often inconsequential – nature of improvements in the Apple Watch arena, and what you get for the money here, I think it’s worth a lot more attention than it typically gets.
In fact, for most iPhone owners, I think the Watch SE 3 is the wearable you need to own. It does most of what the Apple Watch Series 11 does, looks nearly as good and yet costs significantly less.
What do you get for the money?
So what are the differences between the SE 3 and the more expensive Apple Watch Series 11? We’ll start with the price, as that’s the biggest differentiator.
The cheapest Watch SE 3 is the smaller 40mm model at £219, while the 44mm costs £249. At those prices, this watch is an outright bargain, especially considering the Series 11 starts at £399 – nearly double the price.
It almost doesn’t matter that there are both hardware and software restrictions on the Apple Watch SE 3. None of them are significant. But let’s get into what the Watch SE 3 lacks compared with the Series 11 before proceeding any further.
First up, the Watch SE 3 has a smaller, dimmer screen than the Series 11 and a slightly chunkier aluminium case with a plastic rear. The Series 11 can be bought in aluminium or titanium, and it lies flatter on your wrist.
Neither of these deficiencies means the SE 3 looks ugly or feels particularly uncomfortable. The SE 3’s 1,000-nit OLED display is readable in most conditions. And it’s perfectly sharp, too, with a resolution of 368 x 448 pixels on the 44mm model and 324 x 394 on the 40mm.
The Watch SE 3’s battery is claimed to last up to 18 hours, which is shorter than the 24 hours claimed for the Series 11. However, let’s be honest, neither watch is particularly impressive in this regard. You’ll be charging the SE 3 once a day, regardless, just as you would if you bought a Series 11.
In this context, the slower charge of the SE 3 might be a concern, but you can still charge it to 80% in 45 minutes, and 15 minutes of charge will provide eight hours of use, just like its more expensive sibling.
With the SE 3, you don’t get ECG, water temperature or depth gauge, either. There’s no Blood Oxygen (SpO2) app or “Precision find” for your iPhone (due to the absence of an ultrawideband chip), and it also lacks the latest Hypertension notifications.
What did we like about it?
Critically, however, it’s not what it lacks that’s the most important thing about the Apple Watch SE 3 – it’s what it shares with the Series 11 that makes it so great.
For instance, it’s just as water resistant – down to a depth of 50m – and it’s just as fast and responsive. It has the same S10 processor as the Series 11.
While it omits some advanced facilities, there are plenty of things it can do that are seriously impressive. For instance, it can still detect if you’ve fallen over or crashed your car and contact emergency services and/or named contacts.
And it will track all the usual stuff you’d expect any decent wearable to, as well. That means it can count your steps, assess your activity levels and notify you if your heart rate is high, low or irregular. It can detect and warn you if you have sleep apnoea, and record your sleep, breaking it down into different stages to provide an overall score.
It has most of the same sports tracking facilities as the Series 11 (except for snorkelling), and, even though the heart-rate monitor is Apple’s second-generation hardware, it still returns reasonably accurate data while at rest and during workouts. I haven’t spent hundreds of hours with it, but on the runs I’ve used it on, its average and maximum heart rate values have tallied pretty closely with other devices I’ve been using, to within a tolerance of 1.24%.
The SE 3 does, however, suffer from the same dropouts in recordings that many previous Apple Watches have: occasionally, it simply failed to get a lock on my heart rate, and as a result, there were gaps in the heart rate trace. If you want 100% reliability (or close to it), my advice is to wear a chest belt.
The GPS is pretty good, too. Not as good as the very best smartwatches, perhaps. As with all Apple Watches, the data smoothing meant my route plots occasionally lopped off a corner or two. It quite often placed me in the middle of the road, when I was actually running on the pavement, and in tree cover, its single-band GPS occasionally struggled to plot my position accurately on paths. But it’s good enough in terms of distance and pace accuracy for training.
Perhaps most importantly of all, however, the Apple Watch SE 3 is just as good a smartwatch as pretty much any other Apple Watch. It delivers readable notifications promptly with a light buzz or ping, and you can reply using Siri or an onscreen keyboard. Like other Apple Watches, you can use the SE 3 to answer and make phone calls. On-wrist navigation works well, and making payments via NFC is a breeze.
Furthermore, the Apple Watch’s app ecosystem is second-to-none, so if you find something you think the Apple Watch ought to be able to do better, there is likely to be an app to cater to your preferences.
Spotify, for example, provides an alternative to Apple Music and allows you to download your playlists to the watch for listening to while out on a run. I love Workoutdoors, which is a great way of tracking workouts and displaying maps at the same time – WatchOS’s built-in trail running mode just can’t compare.
There are plenty of apps like Slopes (skiing) that cater to niche sports tracking. And I always feel smug wearing an Apple Watch in the airport and being able to get my boarding pass QR code on my wrist.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the great things you can do with the Apple Watch SE 3, but it gives you a flavour. It also shows that there’s a far greater proportion of things this watch shares with its more expensive sibling than those it lacks.
What could be improved?
Unfortunately, one further thing it shares with other Apple Watches is short battery life. Just like the Watch 9 Series that the SE 3 inherits its body case from, the SE 3 lasts only “up to 18 hours” on a single charge, according to Apple.
That means you’ll have to charge it every day and, if you want to track your sleep with it, you’ll need to remove it from your wrist for an hour or so before bed (or after you wake up in the morning), so you can wear it overnight.
That is, let’s face it, abysmal compared with much of the non-Apple competition. My favourite smartwatches over the past year are the Huawei Fit 4 Pro and the Huawei Watch GT 6 Pro.
Both look great and are built beautifully, track all the usual health and metrics pretty well, but despite having similarly bright, vibrant OLED displays, these smartwatches can last a week or more on a single charge, sometimes even longer if you don’t engage the GPS as much as I do. Garmin offers smartwatches with great battery life, too, with its Vivoactive 6 delivering “up to five days” of use with always-on display mode enabled.
And – do you really need reminding – Apple Watches only work with iPhones. So if you decide you want to move on from the iOS/WatchOS ecosystem, you’ll have to abandon or sell your Apple Watch. That’s another reason why I tend to recommend other smartwatches over Apple Watches.
Should you buy the Apple Watch SE 3?
Those are really the only bad things I can think of to say about the Apple Watch SE 3. If the poor battery life and having to charge it every day don’t get under your skin, and you’re a lifelong committed iPhone user, then have at it.
The Watch SE 3 offers 99% of the features of the more expensive Series 11 at nearly half the price, and its heart rate and GPS accuracy will be good enough for most people save serious athletes and running or cycling fanatics.
I still prefer the Huawei Fit 4 Pro for sheer value as it works across all platforms, is a little tougher and has better battery life, but this comes second place as a budget offering.
