Find out how to use the Taptic Time feature on your Apple Watch to know the time without even looking at your watch.
The Taptic Engine — Apple’s vibratory motor inside every Apple Watch — gives you additional ways to mark time by optionally tapping out the time on your wrist. This is called Taptic Time.
With Taptic Time, you can tell time in silent mode without looking at the watch. That’s awesome not just for the visually impaired, but also for power users because you can keep track of the time while multitasking without glancing at your wrist.
It makes your Apple Watch a more flexible timekeeper — a haptic version of time will tap out the hour on your wrist — and can be customized to use Morse code or distinguish hours and minutes with various tap lengths.
Turn on Taptic Time on the Apple Watch
You can do it from your wrist or the companion iPhone.
From Apple Watch
1) Open the Settings app on your Apple Watch.
2) Scroll down and tap Clock.
3) Swipe down and hit Taptic Time.
4) Turn on the switch for Taptic Time and choose your preferred taptic style to use for it:
- Digits: This is the default choice. Your Apple Watch will long-tap for every ten hours and short-tap for each following hour. Then, it will long-tap for every ten minutes and short-tap for each following minute.
- Terse:Â The watch will long-tap for every five hours, then short-tap for the remaining hours. Then it will long-tap for each quarter hour.
- Morse Code: When this is on, the watch will tap each digit of the time in Morse code.
You can now “feel the time” on your wrist in silent mode.
Using your iPhone
1) Open the Watch app on your iPhone and tap Clock from the My Watch section.
2) Tap Taptic Time.
3) Turn on the switch for Taptic Time and pick a style for it.
Learn about Chimes
Aside from Taptic Time, there’s also a Chimes (earlier called Taptic Chimes) feature in watchOS settings.
As detailed in our dedicated Taptic Chimes tutorial, that optional feature will prompt the watch to discreetly tap a short pattern on your wrist on the hour or the half hour. And if sound is enabled, you will hear an audible chime, too, in form of the sound of a robin chirping.
The difference between Chimes and Taptic Time is two-fold.
First, you don’t get to choose between distinct haptic feedback patterns with Chimes as you do with Taptic Time.
Secondly, Chimes are hard-coded to go off on the hour or the half-hour, depending on your liking, whereas Taptic Time relies on an entirely different schedule to buzz your wrist with a series of distinct taps.
Check out next: 10 actually useful tips and tricks every Apple Watch owner should know about