Top 20 Unknown Apple Watch Series 5 Features

Here are more than 20 unknown features on the Apple Watch Series 5, and if you have an older version of the Apple Watch, a lot of these will likely work with that too, so definitely give them a shot. With that out of the way, let's get started. I'm sure you all knew that there is a camera app that comes pre-installed on the Apple Watch, and if you open that you can take control of your phone's camera, but what you might not have known is that if you scroll this wheel, you'll actually zoom in or out, and this is actually changing the cameras on the phone. So if I go all the way back here, you can see that it switched to the wide-angle camera on my 11 Pro Max. Another thing you might not have known is that if you tap on the screen, you can actually change where the camera is focusing, and a feature that a lot of people don't know about is if you force touch, you can actually change some parameters on the camera. So here I can flip to the front-facing camera, I can turn on or off HDR mode, I can change my flash settings, and I can turn live pictures on or off. Another fun fact is that this works in pretty much every camera mode. So right now I'm in photo, but if I reach over here and switch to video, you'll see that the icon on the bottom changes, so let me know that I'm in video mode, and if I keep going here, I can switch to slow-mo, and again the icon changes, time-lapse, icon changes again, and if I go back the other way, this is portrait mode, and you can even see the notification here to tell me to move further away, it's obviously way too close to take that photo, and panorama is the only one that doesn't work, which kind of makes sense because you do have to turn the phone in order to take a panorama photo, but fortunately you can just tap this photo text here and switch back to regular photo mode. Now in case you're wondering, you can't change to any other modes from the watch itself, you do have to change that on the phone. If you started a workout and you're doing some sort of an interval training, you can actually just double-tap the screen, and it'll show you that split, so you'll get details for each split every time you double-tap the screen. So if I do it again, I'll get another split for just 8 seconds. If you had an application open on your watch a little bit earlier, and then you put your wrist down, and by the time you brought it back up, it had already gone back to the clock screen, all you have to do is double-press the dial, and it takes you right back into the last app you had opened. And if you double-press the dial again, it will switch to the app that you had opened before that. And at this point, you can just keep double-tapping, and it's going to keep switching between your two most recent apps. If you have music playing on your phone or a Bluetooth device that's connected to your phone, you're going to get a little icon that pops up at the top of your watch face on your Apple Watch. If you tap that icon, it's going to take you straight into your music controls. And on the very off chance you didn't already know this existed, if you turn the dial while you're in the music controls, you can either increase or decrease your volume. Just like with the music app, you'll also get an icon when you're working out. So right now, I started a workout, and if I tap this icon, it takes me right into the workout details. If your screen is off and it's really dark out, or maybe you're in a movie theater, and you just want to quickly check the time, but you don't want the screen to turn all the way on and be super bright, you can just scroll the dial a little bit, and you're going to get a very dim screen, and the further you scroll that dial, the brighter your screen is going to get. So this is a great way to kind of discreetly check the time without having a bright light shine from your wrist. If you're someone who typically finds yourself running late wherever you go, then you're going to want to turn on this next feature. If you go to your apps, then swipe over to your settings and go into that app, then scroll down until you get to clock, then open that, you're going to get an option to set the watch face display time ahead. So if I tap this, I can increase the time by, say, five minutes, tap set, and when I go back to my watch face, it's going to say that the time is 8.32, even though it's actually 8.27. So if I go back, you'll see that it says 8.32. So now, whenever you look at your watch to see how much time you have left to get somewhere, you'll think you have less time than you actually do, hopefully leave a little bit earlier and actually make it on time. Now, if you're one of those people who knows that you set it five minutes forward, and you're just going to give yourself an extra five minutes anyway, then there's nothing I can do to help you. The next few unknown features are found in the watch app itself. So if you go ahead and open up the app, then go to the my watch tab, then tap general, then scroll down to the bottom, you'll see there's an option here for enabling a screenshot. Now by default, when you first get your watch, that's going to be off. But if you turn that on, you're going to be able to start taking screenshots on your Apple watch. And to take a screenshot, all you have to do is press in the dial and side button at the same time. And the screenshot is then saved directly to your iPhone. So practical application for this would be with the fitness application, you can take a screenshot of a personal record. And then later when you get back home, you can share that screenshot on social media using your phone. Or if you're listening to something like Spotify, Pandora, or Google Play Music, and it's on kind of a randomized playlist or like a radio playlist, and you hear a song that you really like and you quickly just want to jot down what that song is so you can look it up later, you can actually just open up the music player app on the phone, and that's going to show the name of the song and the artist. And all you have to do from here is just take a quick screenshot. And now you have the artist and song saved for later. Below enable screenshots is another important option. This is called workout power saving mode. And this is great if you forgot to charge your Apple watch, but you need to use it to track a really long run that you're about to go on and you don't think the battery is going to last for the duration of the run. If you turn this on, it's going to turn off the always on display and the built in heart rate sensor, but it is still going to track steps. So you are going to lose that heart rate tracking ability, but at least you'll be able to get all of the steps, the total distance and the duration for the run. And it says here that it is still going to try to estimate your calories burned, but it won't be as accurate as if it had the heart rate data. If you don't like the fact that the Apple watch will return it back to the watch face and leave an application after you've had your arm down for a few minutes, and instead you want to raise your wrist and always be back in the application you just had open, then there's a setting here that you're going to want to change. If you scroll back up a little bit, you're going to see this option called wake screen. Go ahead and tap that. And on the bottom here, it says on screen wake show last app. So by default, this is probably going to be set to within two minutes of last use. So if you're using an application and then you put your wrist down and you did something else for a couple of minutes, after a couple of minutes, when you pick your wrist back up, it won't be in that app anymore. And it's going to be back on the watch face. If you want the app to stay there longer, you can switch it to an hour or you can have it always stay on so that you manually have to go back to the clock face whenever you want to do that. And if you hate the fact that the app pops back up, if you've lifted your arm within a couple of minutes, then you can go ahead and turn on never unless in session. And as you can see here at the bottom, session refers to either the workout, maps, remote, timer, and some third party apps. While we're here, if you like your watch face to stay on longer when you tap it, which I personally do, you can change it from stay awake for 15 seconds to stay awake for 70 seconds. Everybody knows that when you press the side button, it shows your recent applications and you can scroll through those applications and select one of them to jump right back into it. But a lot of people don't know is that this is fully customizable. So if you jump into the Apple Watch app on your phone, then tap dock, you can switch it from recents to favorites. And what this allows you to do is show any applications you want in any order you want. So instead of showing your recent applications, it'll show your most recent application on top, followed by this order of applications below it. And if I want to change this list, just tap edit in the corner. I can grab these bars and move things around. And if I want to remove one, I just tap the minus, tap remove. And if I want to add an application, I just scroll down, tap add, and the application pops up on the bottom. Now when I tap done, this immediately takes effect on my watch. So now if I press the side key button, it shows the most recently used application, which was the ECG, followed by the apps in the exact order I set up on the phone. And if I scroll all the way up to the recently used application and just sit there for a second, it's going to give me the option to keep that application in the dock. If I tap that, you see that it gets updated right here in the app. If you go back to the main screen in the Apple Watch app on your phone and tap notifications, you'll reveal another really useful feature, and it's called notification privacy. So if you tap this, what this will do is hide any sensitive information. So like if you get a text message, the message will only show the person that it was sent from, but it won't actually display the message until you tap on it. So this is a great way to protect your messages from prying eyes. This next feature is pretty well hidden. You actually have to go to display and brightness, then tap always on, then enable always on. Then you're going to see this option here to hide sensitive complications. And if you turn this on, it's going to hide things like your next calendar appointment, your mail messages, your heart rate, and pretty much anything else that would be in a complication that's sensitive data whenever your wrist is down. So you're only going to see that information when you're actually looking at the watch. So for example, I just set up this appointment on the bottom, and whenever I'm looking at the watch, you can see the appointment. But whenever I put my wrist down or put my hand on the screen to put it into ambient mode, then it's just going to change to calendar. And then whenever I lift my wrist or tap the screen again, it's going to show me the appointment. So this is another awesome way to keep your private data private. By default on the Apple Watch, when you swipe up from the bottom to reveal all these shortcuts, if you tap either airplane mode or do not disturb mode, it's also going to enable those modes on the iPhone itself. And the same vice versa. If you enable them on the phone, it's going to be enabled on the watch. If you want independent control of those two things, all you have to do is go into the Apple Watch settings on your phone. So from the Apple Watch app, you just tap general, then airplane mode, then uncheck mirror iPhone, go back to general, go to do not disturb, then uncheck mirror iPhone again. So as you can see, you get independent control as well. So if you just want airplane mode to sync between the two of them, but you don't want do not disturb mode to sync, you want independent control on the watch and the phone, then you can do that with these settings. And in the do not disturb settings, you'll also see this workout do not disturb. If you turn this on, what that'll do is it'll turn on do not disturb whenever you're in the middle of a workout. Then when you stop the workout, it'll automatically turn do not disturb mode back off. If you get bombarded with a bunch of notifications on your Apple Watch, you can actually fine tune which notifications you get and how exactly you get those notifications by going into this notifications tab here. This first list is all of Apple's applications. And if you tap one of them, you can get custom options for the notifications. So here you can either allow notifications, send them directly to notification center, or turn them off completely. Now, if you allow notifications, you can also change which email you get them from. So obviously, this is the mail app, and I can choose to get them from my YouTube email by checking that box. And then I can choose to have them come with sound and haptic feedback or just haptic feedback or just sound or neither. You can also change notification grouping. Now, what this will do is it'll group all of your notifications under a single notification. And when you tap that notification, it expands notifications, and you can scroll through and see all the individual ones. You can turn that one off. So now you'll just get a new notification block for each new notification. You can keep it on automatically, and you can let the watch kind of decide how to group the notifications for you, or you can switch it to by app. And any notification that's within a certain application will all be grouped under that one app. So what that means is if I had like three different email accounts, they would all be grouped under one notification if I did it by app. And if I did it automatically, I'd have a group for my YouTube email, a group for my personal email, and probably another group for whatever other email I had. If you go back to the main notification settings and you keep scrolling down, you'll see all of the apps that you have installed. And this is where you can disable notifications for apps that you just don't want notifications on your wrist for. Sometimes you just want the notifications to be on your phone and not your wrist. So this is a great way to disable those. And in case you're wondering, Mirror My iPhone just means that it's going to take whatever notification settings you have for your iPhone and apply them to the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch has something called Smart Replies. And the way that works is the Apple Watch will kind of analyze the message that you just received and give you some suggestions on what to say. And if you tap one of those, it's just going to immediately send that message. But if you don't like the replies that the Apple Watch typically gives you and you want to create your own, you can do that in the Apple Watch app on your iPhone. So in the Apple Watch app, just scroll down until you get to Messages, tap that, then scroll down again until you get to Default Replies, tap that, then tap Edit. And now you can go ahead and tap in any of these and create any custom message you'd like. You can also change the order that the replies show up. So if I long press this little bar on the side, I can actually drag that up and down. And when I'm done setting all the messages I want to set up, I just tap Done. While we're talking about messages, I do want to point out another unknown feature. If you're on your Apple Watch and you're looking at a conversation, you can force touch anywhere on the screen and you'll get a few more options here. Now, obviously, this is just a normal reply option, but here's the important one, and it's Send Location. If I tap this, I'm going to send that person my location so they can quickly find me. Now, this is particularly useful if you're getting together with a bunch of friends in a big area where it's going to be hard to find each other. Like, let's say you're meeting at a theme park like Six Flags or Disney or something like that. This is a really quick way to let someone know exactly where you are. Another important unknown feature that's found in the Watch app on your iPhone is the SOS feature. So if you scroll down a little bit, you're going to find something called Emergency SOS. If you tap this, you can get the option to turn this feature on by tapping this button right here. So now, if I hold the side button for about five or six seconds, it's going to immediately call emergency services. That said, you shouldn't be worried about accidentally calling emergency services by holding this button too long because it does make a pretty loud siren sound if you hold it past a couple seconds. And that siren sound is just to kind of give you a heads up that if you keep holding that button, it will call emergency services. So here's a quick demo of what that sounds like, but I'm not going to go all the way because I really don't want to call 911 right now. So as you can see, it's pretty loud and you definitely know that button's being held down so you can quickly stop pressing the button and not call emergency services. Alternatively, you could also hold the button for a couple seconds until the menu pops up, then swipe across on SOS to call emergency services. On top of immediately calling emergency services, the SOS feature will also message any emergency contacts you set up and let them know that you're in distress and also send them your location and that's your current location. And it's just going to continually update so they know exactly where you are. So if, God forbid, you got abducted or something, they're going to be able to track your location the entire time as long as you have your phone with you. Fall detection is another way to immediately call emergency services and message your emergency contacts with your location, but this is really geared towards people who are at high risk of falling. So I recommend that you don't turn fall detection on unless you do consider yourself high risk for falling and getting seriously injured. And the reason I don't recommend turning it on is because if you're really physically active, like you exercise a lot and you exercise hard, like maybe you do CrossFit or do a lot of circuit training and things like that, then you may accidentally trigger fall detection while you're doing those workouts. And the last thing you probably want is to constantly be calling 911. Sleep tracking is another feature that a lot of people don't know exists with the Apple Watch. Now, it's not built in. You do need to download a third party application in order to do this, but I found one that works great. The app is called Sleep Watch and you can find it right on the App Store. And if I open it here on my watch, shows up as a little moon icon, you can see that you get a ton of data for how well you slept. So at the top, you can see that it shows I slept from 1220 a.m. to 8 a.m. Under that, it shows me that I got seven hours, 35 minutes of sleep out of the eight hours that I was targeting. It shows here that I'm under my three-day target. So my three-day target is basically getting eight hours of sleep consistently, three nights in a row. And it shows that I'm not quite making it to that target. Down a little further, it shows me what my average heart rate is while I'm sleeping. Below that shows my heart rate dip. This is the difference between my resting heart rate when I'm awake and my sleeping heart rate. And if you open the app on the iPhone, it goes into detail on what a heart rate dip even means and whether or not your heart rate dip is good and how to improve your heart rate dip as well. Restful sleep shows you how much of your sleep was actually restful and rejuvenating. You also see your sleep rhythm here. This disruption shows you what percentage of your sleep you were disrupted by something else. So this would be like if there was a loud sound that woke you up or if you're woken up by your kids or something like that, that'll show up in this disruption section. Average sleep HRV, I haven't actually tracked enough nights in a row to actually have a reading here, but that'll come in sometime later. Restedness is pretty cool. So when you use the watch to sleep track a night of sleep, sometime later on during the day, it's going to ask you how rested you're still feeling. And you can say that you feel completely rested, somewhat rested, or basically that you're totally exhausted. And it's going to use that information to give you advice on how to improve your sleep quality. Below here is a chart. The top bar means I was awake. The middle bar means light sleep, and the bottom bar is deep sleep. And if you tap that, it'll actually explain what they are there. And this is all included in the free version of the application. If you want to get a bunch more features, you can get a paid version as well, but the free version will definitely be more than enough for most people. By now, you probably all know that a red dot at the top of your watch face means you have notifications. So if you swipe down, you get your notifications. But what you might not know is that if you force touch, you can actually clear all of your notifications in one shot. Most people already knew that if you swipe up from the bottom, you get to these quick toggles. And if you swipe down a little further, you get this little icon here. If you tap that icon, it's going to make your phone ring so you can find it. But what most people don't know is that if you hold that icon, it's also going to make your LED flash. Another feature that some people might not know about is that if you long press with two fingers on any watch face, you can have the time read out loud to you. And in the case of the Mickey Mouse watch face, it reads it out in Mickey's voice. And if it's any watch face other than the Mickey Mouse watch face, it'll just read it out in Siri's voice. There are a couple features on the app screen that you might not know about. The first is if you long press, you can actually move the applications around to wherever you'd like. So you can quickly get to your most used applications by moving them around the clock icon. As you can see, some little X's pop up as well. And if you tap an icon that has an X, you get the option to delete that application. If instead of long pressing, you force touch by pressing harder on the screen, you get the option to switch to list view and scroll through your applications like that. To switch back, just long press again and tap grid view. If you ever have an app crash or just your Apple Watch in general crashes or freezes or something's just not working quite right, you can actually force reset it. This isn't going to factory reset it. It's just going to turn the Apple Watch off and then back on. To do that, all you have to do is hold the side button and the dial button at the same time. Now the Apple logo pops back up and it's going to restart. This next feature is sort of a bonus feature because I have a feeling most people know that this feature exists because they probably found it by accident. But if you swipe in from one of the edges of the screen while you're on a watch face, it'll actually switch to different watch faces. And if you want to change the order of the watch faces, you can just open up the Apple Watch app on your phone, then scroll down to my faces, tap edit, then long press these little three lines on the sides of any of the watch faces, and then you can just move them to wherever you want. Let me know if I missed any unknown or hidden features in the comments below. And if you have an older version of the Apple Watch, let me know if any of these features didn't work on your Apple Watch. And as always, guys, don't forget to like it if you liked it, share it if you loved it, and subscribe for more in-depth smartphone and smartwatch videos. And while you're at it, smack that notification bell so you can be the first to know when the videos drop. That's it for this techisode. God bless, guys, and I'll catch you in the next one.