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I had this Casio on my wrist for more than a month and used one of its handful of functions every single day, something I can"t say for many smartwatches. I used the stopwatch to track my rest intervals between sets at the gym. I set my world time to New Delhi, India, the time zone my sister and parents are in. I"ve used the compass to navigate when I emerge from the subway in New York City and can"t get my bearings, and I"ve learned to read the barometer—mostly just to see how cool it is to predict the weather without having to ask a voice assistant.

I love how this watch looks. It"s rugged and outdoorsy, but still relatively classy. Even better, it"s incredibly comfortable to wear. Seriously, I never took it off in the month I tested it. It"s been fine in the shower and through workouts. I love that it"s made of biomass plastics from regenerative resources, such as castor seeds and corn (and other raw materials). Don"t let that worry you about durability; I"ve been through a move, dinging it on various walls, got paint on it, and yet it looks pristine. The dial is easy to read—the indices glow or you can press a button right below the case to light "em all up for nighttime visibility. And you never need to recharge it. Casio’s Tough Solar tech means it recharges itself via sunlight.

The Apple Watch Series 8 is the model that’s best for most people. With an always-on display, two sizes to choose from, and advanced health and fitness features, it’s great for buyers upgrading from an older Apple Watch or folks who are trying out a smartwatch for the first time.

Of all the smartwatches we’ve tested—for both iPhone and Android—the Apple Watch Series 8 represents the best overall combination of features and price. It does the things most people want just as well as, or better than, any other Apple Watch, including tracking workouts, sending text messages, and getting app notifications. Like the Series 7, the Series 8 comes in two case sizes—41 mm and 45 mm—with more viewable area thanks to slightly larger casings and narrower borders. The always-on screen means you don’t have to lift your arm to check the time or the status of your apps. The Series 8 also has the most complete suite of health tools compared with every other Apple Watch but the Ultra, including blood-oxygen monitoring and ECG as well as new temperature sensors for advanced menstrual cycle tracking. Like the Series 7, the Series 8 supports faster charging and has more crack-resistant glass. The Apple Watch Series 8 is a great smartwatch to buy if you’ve never owned one before, and it’s a solid upgrade if you have an Apple Watch Series 4 or older. If you own a Series 5, 6, or 7 that’s still working well, though, the Series 8’s features won’t seem like much of an upgrade.

At first glance, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the Series 8 and Series 7 apart. Both come in 41 mm and 45 mm case sizes, which translates to a 1 mm height increase over the Apple Watch SE (which comes in 40 mm and 44 mm sizes). The same watch bands still fit the SE, as well as the smaller and larger versions of past generations. That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. The black bezel around the Series 8’s screen is narrower than that of previous versions of the Apple Watch, a design change that provides about 20% more screen real estate compared with the Series 4, 5, and 6. Combined, the case size and the narrower bezel make for a larger screen that offers an appreciable difference and improvement in user experience. We especially like that the bigger on-screen buttons are easier to tap. The display also follows the glass’s curved edges, but this is mainly noticeable on certain watch faces.

The biggest upsides to the Apple Watch Series 8 over our budget pick are twofold. The Series 8’s always-on display shows the time regardless of whether you tap your screen or raise your arm in an exaggerated manner to wake it, whereas the Apple Watch SE isn’t as good at simply being a watch. (Apple introduced an always-on display with the Apple Watch Series 5, so if you own a Series 5, 6, or 7, upgrading to a Series 8 just for that feature isn’t necessary.) The Series 8’s always-on display is made possible by hardware and software features that slow the screen refresh rate and dim portions of it when you’re not poking at it. In particular, instead of updating 60 times a second (60 Hz), as it does when you’re looking at it, most of the time the Series 8’s display is updating just once per second (1 Hz). This design allows you to glance down and see the time and your complications whenever you’d like, without draining the battery quickly.

This always-on mode also supports workouts, so you can see your heart rate, distance, and other statuses without having to tap the Series 8’s screen, and you get passive support for alarms, maps, and the stopwatch. Apple also took privacy into account with the always-on feature: Notifications don’t show up on the screen unless you’re actively using the watch, and you can choose whether you want sensitive information, such as your calendar events, messages, or activity rings, to show on the ambient screen.

The Apple Watch Series 8 has two temperature sensors, a blood-oxygen sensor, and electrocardiogram (ECG) hardware, whereas the SE lacks those components. The temperature sensors are exclusive to the Series 8 and the Ultra; one sits underneath the display, and one resides on the back crystal. The sensors don’t track changes in temperature automatically—you have to enable the watch’s Sleep Focus and Sleep Tracking features, which then allow the sensors to sample your temperature every five seconds while you sleep. You can’t view your nightly temperature, but you can see how your temperature has changed in comparison with your baseline, which is established after five nights of use, in the Apple Health app on your iPhone.

Using this new temperature data, Series 8 owners who track menstruation with the Apple Watch’s Cycle Tracking feature, which uses the period-tracking data you input each month to predict future cycles, will begin to see ovulation estimates in addition to those cycle predictions. This feature sounds helpful for family-planning purposes in theory, but the estimates happen retroactively instead of ahead of time, and they also take two full cycles to take effect. (We’re still testing to see how this function compares to a similar fertility-tracking feature on the popular Oura wearable.)

It’s important to note that following the overturn of Roe v. Wade, people who get periods and may want to track them for fertility purposes are becoming more cautious about where they store that data. An Apple Watch’s body-temperature measurements are stored in the Health app on the iPhone, not on the watch itself. Apple says that the Health app’s data is encrypted on your device when it’s locked. If you upload your data to iCloud, the Health app’s data is included in those backups, but it is end-to-end encrypted as long as you are running iOS 12 or later and have two-factor authentication enabled. The encryption helps to ensure that nobody can access any data stored or collected by the app, including Apple and law enforcement (with a valid subpoena), but if you’re still uncomfortable with this data being online at all, you can disable backups by going to Settings>[your name]>iCloud and disabling Health. Doing so keeps all your health data only on your device and not backed up online.

Using LED lights and photodiodes, the Apple Watch Series 8’s blood-oxygen sensor measures the amount of light reflected back to calculate the color of your blood and, from that, the oxygen saturation; a level of 95% to 99% is generally considered good. Apple positions these blood-oxygen readings as a “wellness” feature, not a medical diagnostic; the sensor is not cleared or approved by the FDA. On the other hand, the Series 8’s ECG hardware is FDA cleared and can help detect a heart arrhythmia (PDF). Apple has been quick to tout examples of lives saved because of notifications of irregular heartbeats, but there’s no guarantee that dangerous or fatal arrhythmia will be detectable, or that the Series 8’s ECG hardware will catch it.

Like previous Apple Watches, the Series 8 can detect falls, and it can automatically call emergency services and your designated emergency contacts if you don’t move after it has detected a fall. (The feature is turned on by default for people over age 65; anyone else can manually enable it.)

Apple’s entire 2022 Apple Watch lineup offers a crash-detection feature. It leverages a new motion sensor with a high-g accelerometer and gyroscope paired with a crash-detection algorithm trained by real-life high-impact car collisions to sense when you’ve been in a crash and immediately call emergency services. We have no plans to intentionally test this feature anytime soon, but some tests have indicated that results can be mixed depending on a variety of factors, such as how long you’ve been driving before the crash occurs. (Car-crash detection is also a feature included in all iPhone 14 models, so you don’t need to buy an Apple Watch specifically for that reason if you’ve already upgraded your phone.)

As for performance, whereas early models of the Apple Watch were almost too slow to function, the more recent Apple Watch revisions have been notably fast devices. The S8 processor in the Series 8 is snappy, though not obviously more so than the last generation. If you currently own a Series 3 or older Apple Watch, upgrading to a Series 8 will give you more dramatic improvements. Apps open with much less delay, you can scroll through lists without lag, and Siri shows the dictation of your voice almost instantly—and as long as you have a good wireless connection, Siri answers almost as quickly. In our tests, Siri on the Apple Watch was noticeably faster and more accurate on the Series 8 than on the Series 3 and older Apple Watch models, whether we were sending text messages, creating reminders, launching apps, pulling up the latest sports scores, or getting directions.

The Apple Watch Series 8 offers all-day battery life and faster charging than almost all other models except the Series 7, which you can juice up just as quickly. (The Apple Watch Ultra also supports fast charging, but its gigantic battery takes a lot longer to recharge.) Apple promises up to 18 hours of use on a charge—enough for the Apple Watch to get through each day when you charge it each night, or for it to track your sleep if you’re willing to charge it for a bit during the day.

Apple has also introduced what it calls Low Power Mode, a new feature in watchOS 9 that can as much as double battery life by disabling the always-on display, as well as turning off heart-rate notifications (for irregular rhythm, high heart rate, and low heart rate), background heart-rate measurements, and background blood-oxygen measurements. Prior to the rollout of watchOS 9, your only option to preserve battery life was a Power Reserve toggle that cut off access to every feature except the ability to tell time.

Included with this version of the Apple Watch (just as in last year’s Series 7) is a fast USB-C charging cable that can juice the Series 8 up at a quicker clip when paired with a 20-watt or higher power brick (not included). Apple says that eight minutes of charging will give you enough power for eight hours of sleep tracking, and in our tests we measured higher charging rates in the same intervals compared with the Apple Watch SE and Series 7. The fast-charge cable will fast-charge only the Series 7 or 8.

Apple Watch battery life has improved since the original launched in 2015, and despite Apple’s relatively conservative battery-life estimates, we’ve found that the Series 8 can easily last more than 24 hours on a charge. Every day Caitlin wore it to track a couple of outdoor walks and a 3-mile run and then wore it overnight to track her sleep. If you want to use the Apple Watch to track sleep, you’ll probably need to charge it either before bed or first thing in the morning. The watch alerts you if it doesn’t have enough power to last through the night, and it sends a notification to your iPhone when it’s done charging.

Charging a watch every night isn’t much of a hassle at home, where you’re likely charging your phone, too. But you do have to bring another cord when you travel. If battery life is your top consideration when buying a smartwatch, the Apple Watch Ultra easily lasts more than two days on a charge (for a lot more money than a Series 8). We have some recommendations for great charging accessories, including three-in-one wireless charging stations for your Apple Watch, iPhone, and AirPods.

As for the design, the Series 8 offers more color and case-material options than the 2nd-gen Apple Watch SE, which is available only in aluminum, and the titanium-only Apple Watch Ultra. The aluminum version of the Series 8 comes in silver, midnight (black with a hint of blue), starlight (a bronzy-silver), and a Product Red version. For a $300 premium, you can choose a stainless steel case in graphite, silver, or gold, all of which also include sapphire screens (rather than glass), which should be more scratch resistant; across all models, the crystal is more crack resistant than on previous generations thanks to its shape and thickness. None of these variations function any differently—it’s just aesthetics and screen material (and price, of course).

We’ve always liked the Apple Watch’s Digital Crown, the hardware dial on the side of the watch that you can use to scroll through lists, and it’s better on the Apple Watch Series 8 than on the Series 3 or earlier models. The crown spins more smoothly, for one thing, but the bigger improvement is haptic feedback: When you’re scrolling through your watch, you feel a clicky sensation, as if you were actually turning the crown against a gear. It isn’t a reason to buy the Apple Watch Series 8, but it is something you’re likely to appreciate if you do. If you want an even more tactile experience with the Digital Crown, our upgrade pick, the Apple Watch Ultra, has a much larger crown with deeper grooves; this design lets you scroll more easily while wearing gloves.

The Series 8 has the same level of waterproofing as all models going back to the Series 2: Apple says it’s water resistant to 50 meters. This means you can swim with it in a pool or open water without damaging the watch. (But Apple says you shouldn’t use the Apple Watch for “activities involving high-velocity water or submersion below shallow depth.”) The Series 8 is a solid swim tracker, but divers and those who swim competitively may want to look at the Apple Watch Ultra.

Apple’s clever band-attachment design is the most frustration-free of any smartwatch we’ve tested, making swapping bands an easy and quick task. Apple offers a slew of band options (many are quite expensive), and you can find hundreds of bands for any budget from third-party vendors. The Apple Watch Series 8 is backward-compatible with bands designed for previous watches, so 38 mm and 40 mm bands fit the 41 mm case size, and 42 mm and 44 mm bands fit the 45 mm watch. If you upgrade from an older model to the equivalent new Apple Watch, you’ll most likely be able to continue using the bands you’ve purchased.

LTE cellular networking lets you use your Apple Watch for anything that requires data—making calls, sending and receiving texts, receiving notifications, streaming music, and more—even when you’re away from your phone. In tests, we’ve found LTE to be rarely necessary and prone to eating up the watch’s battery life, and most Wirecutter staffers who signed up for LTE on their Apple Watch—which costs an extra $5 to $10 a month on the major carriers and isn’t available on others—have since canceled it.