Double tap gesture now available on Apple Watch Series 9, Ultra 2

New Delhi, Oct 26 (IANS) The much-talked about double tap gesture on the newly-launched Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 has gone live for the users with the watchOS 10.1 software update.

With the new double tap gesture, users can easily control Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 using just one hand and without touching the display. 

They can tap the index finger and thumb of their watch hand together twice to quickly perform many of the most common actions. 

“This new feature complements existing gestures like tap, swipe, raise to wake, and cover to mute that make Apple Watch simple and intuitive to use,” Apple said in a statement late on Wednesday.

The double tap gesture is helpful in common situations when the user’s other hand is occupied, such as when walking the dog, cooking, or holding a cup of coffee. 

With Double tap, you can open the Smart Stack from any watch face and scroll through widgets in the stack, answer and end phone calls, view a message from a notification, scroll through longer notifications with an additional double tap, reply using dictation and send a message.

You can also pause, resume, and end a timer, stop and resume a stopwatch and snoozing an alarm, along with playing and pausing music, podcasts, and audiobooks.

The double tap gesture is powered by the S9 SiP, which is 25 per cent more power efficient than the previous generation, and the new 4-core Neural Engine, which can perform machine learning tasks twice as fast.

The double tap gesture works anytime the display is awake, and the feature is available all day long with minimal impact to the 18-hour battery life on Apple Watch Series 9 or the 36-hour battery life on Apple Watch Ultra 2, said Apple.

watchOS 10.1 is available for Apple Watch Series 4 and later, and requires iPhone XS or later running iOS 17.