Like a baby learning how to walk and talk, the Apple Watch can finally stand on its own two feet and proudly say “Look world, I’ve arrived!”

In hindsight, it’s clear Apple at first didn’t know what it wanted the Apple Watch to be. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the smartwatch as “the next chapter in Apple’s story” at the tail end of its iPhone 6 event in 2014, and at first it seemed like the Apple Watch would be a tiny iPhone for your wrist.

Apple boasted about notifications, texting and calling, animated emoji (not to be confused with Animoji), sharing digital heartbeats (weird!), fitness tracking, and insisted apps, much like on iOS, would become the heart of the smartwatch.

The original Apple Watch did all of these things and more, but none of them really well — certainly not to the point where you couldn’t just shrug and live without it.

With each new Apple Watch model, Apple started to key in on what differentiates the smartwatch from an iPhone. Above all else Apple has emphasized fitness and wellness, and with the new Apple Watch Series 4, the company is going even further, positioning it, at least partially, as a medical device that watches your health so you can live a healthier (and hopefully happier) life.

Thanks to bigger screens and more advanced sensors for things like fall detection and ECG readouts, the Apple Watch finally has a real purpose in your life as opposed to being a mere accessory to your iPhone.

Series 4 is the big leap everyone’s been waiting for and it’s truly awesome.

But before we get into all of the reasons why the Apple Watch Series 4 is such a great smartwatch — the best there is at the time of this writing — I need to address the elephant in the room: pricing.

The Apple Watch Series 4 isn’t cheap. Compared to Series 3, which started at $329 and $359 for the GPS-only 38mm and 42mm models, respectively, the Series 4 starts at a higher $399 for the 40mm and $429 for the 44mm GPS-only models.

If you spring for the GPS + Cellular versions of the Series 4, it’s gonna cost you at minimum $499 for the 40mm and $529 for the 44mm.

And that’s only for the aluminum versions. The price balloons if you want the nicer stainless steel or Hermès models. Killed off is the Apple Watch Edition, which sported a ceramic case on Series 3. Apple told me it chooses colors and materials based on what’s in style for the season, so there’s no guarantee a particular model will be sold forever, nor are they saying the Edition won’t make return in the future.

Worth noting is the new gold stainless steel model. It’s kinda hot and perfectly matches the gold iPhone XS and XS Max.

Right off the bat, it’s obvious the Apple Watch Series 4 has changed. The most immediate difference between the new 40mm and 44mm models compared to the Series 3 and earlier versions is the larger displays: They’re over 35 percent and 32 percent larger than the screens on the previous generation 38mm and 42mm devices.

That’s significantly more surface area and more pixels on the OLED screen (394 x 324 on the 40mm and 448 x 368 on the 44mm) to display content, despite being in watch cases that are roughly the same dimensions as the old Apple Watches. Apple crammed a bigger screen into a compact design the same way it did with the iPhone X: It pushed the screen to the edge by shrinking the bezels around it.

My feelings on the Apple Watch’s bigger screens haven’t changed since seeing them after Apple’s fall event. This is exactly what the original Apple Watch should have been and no doubt what Jony Ive and the rest of the design team at Apple wanted to achieve but couldn’t because of technology limitations.

Nevertheless, the Apple Watch Series 4 is just gorgeous. I never fancied the aluminum models (the one and only Apple Watch I bought was the original “Series 0” in stainless steel), but the space gray Series 4 paired with the indigo sport loop band is a fire combo.

Not only does the smartwatch look less bulky, but the thinner optical heart rate sensor on the underside, which is now made of ceramic and sapphire crystal for faster readings and better cellular reception, makes it more comfortable to wear. I usually take my watch (smartwatch or mechanical) off before hopping into bed, but I forgot to on a couple of nights and didn’t loathe myself for not remembering to do so. I didn’t even feel the Apple Watch on my wrist during the night.

Apple’s also improved virtually every part on the Apple Watch. The Digital Crown has been redesigned with haptic feedback whenever it’s rotated. You feel a very satisfying vibrational “click” whenever your turn it; some people say it’s more like the crown on a mechanical watch, but I disagree. There isn’t as much resistance on the Series 4’s Digital Crown — it’s a much more smoother rotating experience — compared to a regular watch crown.

The speakers are noticeably louder (Apple says up to 50 percent louder), the relocated microphones are better for making calls and using the new Walkie-Talkie feature (more on that later), and the side button is a now elegantly flush with the metal body.

My biggest complaint is: Why not an always-on display to show the time? Most WearOS and Samsung smartwatches have a low-power clock mode so you don’t need to flick your wrist to check the time. I get that it’d reduce battery life, but still… it’ll always be just shy of truly being the world’s “No. 1 watch” (Cook’s claims, not mine) if it doesn’t always show the time. 

Even so, the Series 4 comes with a lot of small tweaks that add up to make it more delightful to use. I’m usually itching to take off my smartwatch as soon as I get home (even if it doesn’t need to be charged up), but I found myself leaving the Apple Watch Series 4 on until right before bedtime or not even removing it at all.

When I forced myself to use my Apple Watch “Series 0” for a year, I hated how slow it was. I was perpetually looking at spinning wheels as apps took forever to open and load; watchOS stuttered at every corner.

The original Apple Watch had a SiP (system-in-package) chip, but since then Apple’s sped up its wearable tech considerably. Series 1 and 2, which were confusingly released at the same time, used the same dual-core chip — called S1P and S2. Both chips were up to 50 percent faster than the S1, with the only difference between the two being the lack of a GPS on the S1P.

Then with Series 3, Apple cranked the chip’s performance up to 70 percent faster than the S2. The S3 chip was noticeably faster than anything before it, but it still didn’t feel snappy the way Apple’s A-series chips do on iPhones.

However, with Series 4 and the dual-core S4 chip, the Apple Watch finally feels like it’s almost instantaneous. This is largely due to the chip’s jump from 32-bit to 64-bit processing, which Apple says leads to 50 percent faster performance over the S3 chip.

Together with the larger screen, which makes watchOS 5 more enjoyable to tap and swipe at, the software really glides on the Series 4 Apple Watch. Apps open faster, watch face complications open instantly, and scrolling through notifications is silky smooth.

Just like I predicted after my first hands-on with the new Apple Watch, I found myself spending an extra couple of seconds interacting with notifications — I actually used quick replies because they weren’t slow or janky to scroll through — and wanting to open apps because I knew I wouldn’t have to suffer wait times.

The new Infograph Modular watch face has room for up to six complications.

Lili Sams/Mashable

In addition to faster performance (translation: me smiling more smiling and frowning less), there’s improved cellular connectivity for clearer calls and faster messaging — only on the cellular models of the Series 4, of course.

There’s also a new W3 wireless chip with Bluetooth 5.0 support. This is handy if you’ve got Bluetooth 5.0-compatible wireless headphones, speakers, or other devices that can take advantage of features like greater range (about 130 feet versus about 32 feet on Bluetooth 4.2), faster data transfers (setting up my Series 4 and downloading all the apps was much faster than on Series 3), and better power efficiency.

Sadly, if you own AirPods, you won’t be able to benefit from the increased wireless range. That said, the fact the Apple Watch Series 4 supports Bluetooth 5.0 is probably a good sign that the next version of the wireless earbuds will probably support it as well.

I easily got up to two days of battery life with the Series 4, even with cellular turned on.

Lili Sams/Mashable

Battery life was phenomenal in my nearly week of using the new Series 4. Apple advertises up to 18 hours of battery life with a single charge, which is the same as the Series 3, but I got closer to 48 hours!

Like our phones, battery life will vary with different usage. On the Apple Watch, that mostly comes down to how much you use it for working out, streaming music, and receiving notifications.

Streaming music and activating all of the sensors during workouts is going to deplete battery life quicker. And while you may worry about hundreds of notifications draining the battery fast, of all the features, they probably drain the battery the least.

I was a tad too excited after getting the Apple Watch that I forgot to charge it up to 100 percent and note the battery life. No biggie, because the pre-charged device died by the afternoon on the next day and then I really got to work testing.

“Battery life was phenomenal in my nearly week of using the new Series 4.”

As I shared on Twitter, the Apple Watch still had an impressive 52 percent battery life after 22 hours of receiving hundreds notifications for emails, Instagram DMs, and other apps during a complete workday.

I went for two 45-minute runs — one at 28 hours in and then another the next morning at 39 hours in, where I also streamed Apple Music via LTE the entire time. By the time I passed the 42-hour mark since removing the 100-percent-full Apple Watch from its charger, it still had 20 percent juice left.

To be fair, the first 24 hours was a Friday at the office so I got more notifications and didn’t work out, and the second day was a Saturday so I got fewer notifications but did get to run and stream music.

Days three and four with the Apple Watch were more or less the same. Sunday saw fewer notifications and more activity tracking and on Monday the nonstop torrent of notifications continued all day long.

A balance is obviously important to manage battery life on the Apple Watch. Along with my described usage, I also had the display’s brightness set to around 33 percent (there’s only three settings, which works out to low, medium and high brightness) and found it plenty bright. Even with my sunglasses on I could see the screen perfectly while riding the subway or running in the park.

At work and at home, the Apple Watch connected to WiFi, and LTE everywhere else. Manage your settings well and you can get two days of battery like me.

The Series 4 Apple Watch is water-resistant up to 180 feet.

LILI SAMS/MASHABLE

Apple added the ability to stream Apple Music directly to the Apple Watch earlier this year and while that’s really easy to do, I wish they’d let other music services do the same.

There were rumors users would finally be able to stream Spotify, but those whispers never materialized at WWDC or Apple’s fall event. Apple, open up a little will ya? Apple Music is fine, but let people pick the music service they want to stream to their wrist.

Rounding out the Series 4, you should know that every model comes with 16GB of internal storage (not that I ever really worry about storage on a smartwatch TBH), it supports Apple Pay, and it’s water-resistant up to 180 feet deep.

To say Apple is obsessed with monitoring your health is an understatement. In the eight years since Tim Cook took over as CEO from Steve Jobs, he’s made his imprint on all of Apple’s products by pushing their health-tracking capabilities. That shouldn’t come as a surprise since Cook is known for being somewhat of a health nut (he reportedly gets up at 3:45 a.m. and then hits the gym by the time 5 a.m. rolls around).

The Apple Watch has always come with a built-in heart-rate sensor, and the company’s marketing over the years has leaned more and more into fitness. Whether that’s being less sedentary and standing up every hour, taking a few minutes to breathe and de-stress, closing your activity rings, or keeping tabs on your heart rate, the Apple Watch has a tool for it. Not to mention Apple’s been bolstering (albeit slowly) its HealthKit platform for a number of years.

Series 4 is Apple taking the kid gloves off and saying, “We’re serious about helping you live a healthier life” at a time when we’re all busier than ever before, paying more attention to what’s happening through our glass phones and tablets and computers, it’s good to have the Apple Watch, which is almost like your mom or dad reminding you to take care of yourself.

“Series 4 is Apple taking the kid gloves off and saying ‘We’re serious about helping you live a healthier life.’”

The new smartwatch includes a couple of new health features. The first is fall detection. Using the improved accelerometer and gyroscope, the watch detects variables such as wrist trajectory, acceleration, and force of a fall to determine if you’ve, well, fallen hard and might need emergency assistance.

If the Apple Watch thinks you’ve fallen and need help after a minute of no response, it’ll call an emergency service and then contact your own emergency contact with a text message that includes your location.

Apple told me it field-tested fall detection on over 1,000 users and determined one minute was a good amount of time before having the Apple Watch contact for help. When I asked why not have the Watch contact your emergency contact first and then call an emergency service, I was told their testing found people usually needed fast medical help first if they’d fallen down.

Fall Detection also isn’t easily tripped up (no pun intended). As it turns out, most hard falls caused by, say, tripping on the street or falling down the stairs and any other hard impacts create up to 32 g’s of force. The Series 4 looks for the aforementioned variables (acceleration, trajectory, and impact force) to prevent false positives. Series 3 and older Apple Watches can only detect up to 16 g’s, which makes them not accurate enough for fall detection, Apple told me.

With these powerful measurements, all crunched by the S4 chip in real time, the Apple Watch elevates itself beyond just a notification and fitness-tracking wearable.

Fall detection isn’t foolproof. While it takes an actual hard fall for the feature to be triggered (I couldn’t trick it by falling on my bed or even dropping myself onto carpeted floor — yes, I did it for science!), it can’t detect slumps or light falls.

Interestingly enough: Fall detection isn’t turned on by default unless you’ve 65 or over. Apple says younger people are likely to be more active and perform activities that could accidentally trigger the fall detection (I imagine falling off a skateboard over and over probably would) and therefore it’s turned off by default.

If you don’t usually bust your body, you can turn fall detection on in the Watch app on iOS. Make that the first thing you do if you buy a Series 4.

The Apple Watch has an optical heart-rate sensor (underside) and electric heart-rate sensor (in the Digital Crown) for advanced health monitoring.

LILI SAMS/MASHABLE

Apple’s upping the medical data you can get from the Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor. There are new notifications for low heart rate and irregular rhythms (Atrial fibrillation, also called AFib). In addition to the high heart-rate notifications that were added in watchOS 4, there’s now low heart-rate notifications in watchOS 5; you’ll get a notification if your heart rate falls below a certain threshold for at least 10 minutes.

Irregular rhythm notifications are arguably even more valuable. Apple’s touting the feature as a way to detect early signs of AFib, which is the main cause of strokes. Again, like fall detection, it’s not a replacement for going to a doctor, but it will at the very least keep you informed if you notice something irregular.

Apple Watch Series 1, 2, and 3 users will get the low heart-rate notifications if they update to watchOS 5, and the irregular rhythm notifications will come later this year for U.S. users also running watchOS 5.

Coming in an update later this year, the Digital Crown can take an ECG reading in 30 seconds.

Dustin Drankoski/Mashable

By far the one Apple Watch Series 4 feature that has everyone excited the most is its ability to take an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG). The feature won’t be available until later this year, but Apple’s promising a lot — it’s billed as the first over-the-counter ECG app that’s been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

By just placing your finger on the new Digital Crown for 30 seconds, the Apple Watch can get a readout of your heart’s electrical signals and then compile that info into a graphed waveform PDF document you can then share with your doctor.

My review unit didn’t come with the feature loaded, but I did get to see a real demo of the ECG reader on a Series 4 Apple Watch at a press briefing a week after Apple’s fall event, and it looked promising. I’ll update this review when the feature is available for me to test.

It’s sad the Apple Watch still doesn’t have any sleep-tracking features.

Lili Sams/Mashable

Fantastic and full-featured as the Apple Watch Series 4’s health and fitness capabilities are, it lacks one thing: sleep tracking. Other wearables like Fitbit and Samsung’s Galaxy Watch have built-in sleep tracking.

As a guy who gets terrible sleep and wants to understand the science behind the quality of my Z’s, it’s disappointing to see Apple ignore the feature once again. It’s all the more sad when the Apple Watch (at least the aluminum model I tested) is so comfy to wear to during sleep (something I can’t say the same for the Galaxy Watch or many Fitbits).

WatchOS 5 is compatible with all Apple Watches from Series 1 to Series 4 (the original Series 0 Apple Watch isn’t supported). If you’ve got a Series 1, 2, or 3, you’ll get all of the new workout-tracking features on the Series 4, including the automatic workout detection, yoga and hiking tracking, as well as letting you challenge friends to closing activity rings.

Fitbit owners may cackle at Apple for finally catching up with automatic workout tracking. I’ve used all of Fitbit’s smartwatches and latest fitness trackers that support its SmartTrack technology and only had good things to say about the automatic workout detection.

But Apple gets the last laugh. Whereas it usually takes about 10-15 minutes for Fitbit’s with SmartTrack to auto-detect workouts, the Apple Watch Series 4 only takes a couple of minutes. On the weekend, I was running late to a hair cut appointment and had to sprint to the train station in order to make it in time. It normally takes me about seven minutes to walk from my apartment to the subway station, but with my sprint, it only took half the time and I was impressed to see the auto workout kick in after only about three minutes.

Most people will stick with Apple’s own apps.

LILI SAMS/MASHABLE

WatchOS 5 also allows the Series 1-4 to stream from the Podcast app over LTE, send voice memos using Walkie-Talkie, and raise-to-speak to Siri instead of pressing and holding the Digital Crown.

Raise-to-speak to Siri was a bit of a hit-or-miss for me. Sometimes my Apple Watch would detect my voice and sometimes it wouldn’t. I rarely use Siri on the Apple Watch, so it wasn’t a deal-breaker.

The Walkie-Talkie feature, however, is just so much fun. After inviting friends who have an Apple Watch that’s running watchOS 5, you can press and hold a big yellow button to send a voice message (about 25 seconds — yes, I timed it) and they’ll receive it on their smartwatch as an incoming transmission.

I loved using walkie-talkies as a kid with my sister — remember, we didn’t have the internet back then, and besides it was way more fun to use radio lingo like “Do you copy?” or “10-4” or “Roger that!” — and I had a blast using the Apple Watch version with a few buddies. The downside is anyone without an Apple Watch can’t get in on the two-way fun. I’d love to see a Walkie-Talkie app for iPhone or iPad. It seems like a no-brainer for Apple to expand the feature to its other devices.

There’s some other new stuff in watchOS 5 for the Series 4 like a more detailed weather app that shows data for the air quality, UV index, wind direction, and more, but unless you’re maybe a big camper or outdoors person, you probably won’t really be moved by them.

All older Apple Watches that support watchOS 5 get the new Breathe, Fire and Water, Liquid Metal, and Vapor watch faces. But on the Series 4, they use up the entire screen, as opposed to being confined to a circle. As a result, these watch faces are more visually stunning to look at. (Fun fact: Apple actually shot real fire, water, and vapor; they’re not CGI.)

New and exclusive to the Series 4 are the Infograph and Infograph Modular watch faces. Both of these watch faces are designed to cram in more info at glance — Infograph is customizable with up to eight watch complications (AKA shortcuts or widgets) and Infograph Modular with up to six complications.

Like others who first saw the two watch faces following Apple’s fall event, I initially felt like they crammed too much info into the screen. But as an Apple Watch user, I quickly got used to them. While the colorful complications seem a bit childish at first glance, the multiple colors actually make it easier to glance at more info all at once.

The Mickey Mouse watch face will always be my favorite (how can you not love his arms as clock hands and his tapping foot for the ticking seconds?), but Infograph is the one that makes the best use of the larger screen so it’s the one I stuck with.

After a week of wearing the Apple Watch Series 4, I now understand why Apple’s smartwatch stole the show from the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR.

With new iPhones, we know what to expect: faster performance, better cameras, and longer battery life. But with the Apple Watch, the future is still a mystery. A smartwatch’s defining features are still for any company to decide.

Apple’s defined its smartwatch better with every new version, pivoting away from a do-it-all mini iPhone on your wrist to a fitness-focused wearable, and now it’s smartly turning it to an “intelligent guardian for your health.”

The Apple Watch Series 4 does all of the things Series 3 does — faster and better — but it’s the smartwatch’s quiet role as a medical device that helps safeguard your health with features like fall detection and an ECG sensor that makes it a compelling device you want to own.

“You can’t do anything without your health and it’s important to take care of it.”

It’s almost as if the Apple Watch is insurance — if something unfortunate were to happen to you in the future, you’ll be glad you have it to call an emergency service or nudge you to go to the doctor because of an irregular heartbeat.

Is having your fitness tracking, notifications, music, and phone and messaging today, plus the small promise of a better-monitored and healthier future worth paying at least $399 for the 40mm (GPS) and $499 for the 44mm (GPS + Cellular) Apple Watch Series 4? I say yes, because as my parents always remind me: You can’t do anything without your health and it’s important to take care of it.

With Apple Watch Series 4, juggling your digital life and your real life with a single device from on your wrist no longer feels like an compromised chore.

• Senior Tech Corresponent

  Raymond Wong

• Tech Editor

  Pete Pachal

• Photography

  Lili Sams and Dustin Drankoski