In terms of bands, Apple has fortunately not made any changes to the already well-established Apple Watch band attachment mechanism. Push the button on the bottom of the case, and the band easily slides away from the case, allowing you to swap it for your favorite Apple Watch band released in the past decade, as long as it has been intended for any of Apple's 44mm, 45mm, or 49mm smartwatches.

Apple has a number of new color options for its base Apple Watch Ultra bands, the Trail Loop, the Ocean Band, and the Alpine Loop. They all match the new watch perfectly,

Apple Watch Ultra 3 Software & Features

watchOS 26 with all the health features you need

The Apple Watch comes along with watchOS 26, Cupertino's latest software for its smartwatches, and it comes along with the Liquid Glass redesign that's universal across the ecosystem. Although I am not really a fan, I have to admit Liquid Glass looks okay on the watch, where the lack of multiple different layouts and differing interfaces means that it can look extremely cohesive almost all the time.

Among the new software features that came with the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is a wrist flick gesture that allows you to dismiss notifications, get back to your homescreen, and so on, similarly to the iPhone's shake-to-undo feature. It works well, and it quickly becomes a second nature to flick away your wrist in order to dismiss whatever's on the Apple Watch without having to actually touch it with your free hand. In the same vein, the superb double-pinch feature that lets you answer calls, advance the interface, open your widget stack, and so much more.

Don't expect the Apple Watch Ultra 3 to work with any other phone apart from an iPhone––Apple still keeps things tight and controlled.

Workout features

For all the data freaks out there, advanced metrics like power and cadence are available, as well as utterly customizable custom workouts that can be tailored to track whatever you want. Detailed data, power zones, cadence, power, cycling metrics, swim strokes, and many other

The Apple Watch still covers pretty much any activity you might ever pick up, including exotics like… Fitness Gaming, and pickleball, and barre, among other more common sports and activities.

The heart rate accuracy seems to be just about right from what I can tell. Comparing the Apple Watch Ultra 3 against two other non-Apple smartwatches shows way more logical results, with fewer deviations and irregular readings. If anything, I'm poised to believe the heart rate readings from the Apple Watch Ultra 3 a bit more.

And just like previous Apple Watch Ultra devices, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 allows recreational diving up to 40 meters and has a diving computer functionality built in. Thanks to the water temperature and depth sensors, you get to see important details about your dive, including depth and water temperature.

Aside from this novel sleep grading, the rest of the sleep-tracking features remain a core staple of the wearable. Your sleeps are broken by REM, core, and deep sleep. The best feature of all has to be the automatic nap detection through the day, though, which has been around for a while.

Health features

In terms of health tracking, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 supports all the features its predecessors did, including heart rate monitoring, ECG, irregular rhythm notifications, high and low heart rate, respiratory rate, and new this year, hypertension alerts. The latter will inform you if it detects higher than usual blood pressure, though you'd need to wear the device for at least 30 days so that a baseline could be established.

Menstrual cycle tracking and ovulation estimation are also part of the feature set.

Blood oxygen tracking is also back on the Apple Watch. The latter was removed after a patent dispute with Masimo, but the feature seems to be back on the Apple Watch Ultra and the rest of the company's smartwatches, but the legal battle with Masimo appears to be still ongoing, so there's no saying what the future for the blood oxygen feature will bring.

Apple Watch Ultra 3 Battery and Charging

Great battery backup

When it comes to battery life on smartwatches, the battery life standard varies widely between semi-smart fitness watches, like Garmin and Amazfit, and proper smartwatches, like the Apple Watch and the Galaxy Watch. Hybrids like the OnePlus Watch 3 that utilize clever tricks to achieve week-long battery life and still run Google's full-fledged WearOS are an exception to that rule.

The Apple Watch 3 Ultra comes with a larger battery than the one inside the Watch Ultra 2. Thanks to the more efficient Apple S10 chip on board (with a quad-core Neural Engine and 64 GB of storage nonetheless), the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is now rated for 42 hours of regular usage and up to 72 hours in Low Power mode.

That's okay for a smartwatch but will widely vary depending on how you use your smartwatch. Intensive GPS navigation and checking out maps, and actively using the workout feature will deplete the battery much faster than wearing it to your 9-to-5 desk job and relying solely on it for, well, telling the time and notifications.

In my experience and with my own unique usage, the watch loses around 25 to 30% of battery per day. Yes, that's higher than the advertised 42-hour mark, but we should not forget that Apple factors in a rather strenuous usage, consisting of, and I quote, "600 time checks, 180 notifications, 30 minutes of app use, a 60-minute workout with music playback from Apple Watch via Bluetooth, and 6 hours of sleep tracking over the course of 42 hours".

That's definitely a bit more extreme than what I'd call my regular everyday usage, hence the better real-life battery life figures I can report.

Charging-wise, we get fairly fast charging, giving us 80% of battery in just 45 minutes. That's faster than previous Apple Watch wearables, and means your watch will spend less time on the charging puck, more time on your wrist, which is great.

Should you buy it?

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is an excellent smartwatch and easily the best one if you're locked in the Apple ecosystem. For iPhone users, nothing comes close in terms of features and functionalities.

That said, it still doesn't feel as if owners of the first and second generations of the Apple Watch Ultra have to upgrade to the Apple Watch Ultra 3. The overall differences are still pretty much negligible, and if it isn't for some specific new feature that the Watch Ultra 2 or 3 introduced, then you might as well still keep on using your original Apple Watch Ultra, which doesn't feel outdated at all.