Apple Watch May Be More 'Waterproof' Than Apple Inc. Suggests

Drop your phone into the drink, and it will likely need a replacement. Swim with an Apple Watch, and it may actually survive.

Apple Inc. claims its Apple Watch is water-resistant but in its user guide stops short of calling it waterproof. While Australian smartphone website FoneFox doesn’t recommend wearing it in the shower or taking it for a swim, researchers there subjected it to a series of water tests and found it may do just fine in watery conditions.

In the first test, researchers took the Watch for a five-minute shower, and it was no worse for the wear afterward. The next involved full submersion for five minutes in a bucket of water, with the same results. The testers then took things one step further, swimming with the smartwatch for 15 minutes. Though the touch screen did not work underwater, once taken out of the pool, the Watch worked just fine.

While Apple doesn’t recommend full submersion of the Apple Watch, it actually carries an ingress protection, or IP, rating of IPX7. This means no water can enter the Watch while immersed in up to one meter of water for 30 minutes.

That is not, of course, to encourage customers to regularly subject the Watch to swimming or deep-sea diving. But if one happens to fall into a pool, there’s a good chance it will not be necessary to fork out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a replacement.

Apple's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus don't come with the same water-resistant features. Future iPhones may eventually be able to survive underwater, suggests an Apple patent application published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.