Apple Watch Series 3 reviews are in and it’s not great news for those of us who have been excited about (and preordered) LTE models.
The promise of this product is clear. Leave your iPhone behind, but still be accessible, as John Gruber writes:
Apple turned Apple Watch into a goddamn cell phone, without making the device thicker or heavier, and it still lasts all day.
That promise hasn’t quite been met, as Lauren Goode writes. Her first review unit behaved so erratically, Apple replaced it:
But that doesn’t mean the LTE connectivity issues went away. On more than one occasion, I detached myself from the phone, traveled blocks away from my home or office, and watched the Watch struggle to connect to LTE. It would appear to pick up a single bar of some random Wi-Fi signal, and hang on that, rather than switching to LTE.
Goode isn’t alone in experiencing these problems, but not all reviews I’ve read mention them.
However, it’s definitely a thing, as Apple ended up making a statement to The Verge on the issue:
When Apple Watch Series 3 joins unauthenticated Wi-Fi networks without connectivity, it may at times prevent the watch from using cellular. We are investigating a fix for a future software release.
Yikes. While I trust Apple will work this out, it’s sure a bad look for a brand-new device.