I want to buy an Apple Watch to track my heart rate and number of laps as I swim, and that’s it. The reason I’m choosing the Apple Watch as a fitness tracker is that looking at the graphs on the youtube channel The Quantified Scientist, it looks like it is a lot more accurate than any other wrist-worn device, and a few percentage points off can give a very wrong heart rate reading. My primary phone isn’t even an iPhone, I just have one lying around to activate it with. I haven’t found any other comparisons that are this in-depth. But it’s difficult to understand the software without having one, so I just want to make sure I can swim and look at my wrist and see both my heart rate and number of laps in a 15 yard pool. Also, it looks like every Apple Watch in the last several years has the exact same heart rate sensors so I can just go with the cheapest SE or whatever. Is this correct? Thanks.
Apple warns that it may not be able to read your head rate due to water interfering, but it often works and it will even identify the stroke type for you! I’m not sure if you can even activate an Apple Watch without an iPhone. As the setup is usually carried out via the iPhone. Trying to type account details on the watch it just terrible to be honest