Hands-On With the New Theater Mode in watchOS 3.2
Apple released the first beta of watchOS 3.2 for developers this morning, and included in the update is a brand new "Theater Mode." Theater Mode is designed to let customers mute the sound on the Apple Watch and disable Raise to Wake, preventing the screen from lighting up with arm movement.
Since watchOS 3.2 is limited to developers, we went hands-on with Theater Mode in the video below to give MacRumors readers an idea of what they can expect when the update is released to the public.
Theater Mode can be accessed by swiping up on the watch face to bring up the Control Center. It's just below the option for silencing the Apple Watch and features an icon with two theater masks.
When Theater Mode is turned on, it prevents the Apple Watch from making noise and it keeps the screen dark even when the wrist is raised. Notifications still come through, however, and are delivered via haptic feedback. The Apple Watch's screen can be activated with a tap or through a press on the Digital Crown.
watchOS 3.2, which will likely be released to the public sometime in March, also brings SiriKit to the Apple Watch, letting customers ask Siri to do tasks like sending messages, sending payments, booking a ride, and more.
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Top Rated Comments
All the existing buttons on the swipe-up panel are still there. They just made it taller. Nobody loses anything. Considerate theatre-goers get a nice boost in convenience.
To be perfectly clear: any light source in a theatre coming from a person is rude and very distracting. Period. It's never okay. And it's almost always 10x brighter than you think it's going to be. In fact, the farther away you are from it, the worse and more distracting it becomes as that is the nature of light, the smaller the source of light relative to your view, the higher contrast it will have in the view.
So in reality, the watch lighting up is actually worse than a phone. And personally, I have always gone through the trouble of manually setting my watch to behave as this mode does during any movie screening I attend. I'll be very happy to be able to do it in a swipe + tap.
On another note, I wonder about the water icon there. It's not there on my current watch. Is this a series 2 specific feature? If not, is it also new? What does it do?