21 THINGS I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE APPLE WATCH UNTIL I STARTED WEARING ONE
INITIAL RUMINATIONS ON A TINY DEVICE THAT'S
BURSTING AT THE SEAMS WITH NEW IDEAS, FEATURES, AND APPROACHES.
Apple Watch is
launched. In some ways, that's more of a ceremonial rite than a statement of
practical reality. With Apple's online-only ordering, you can't just barge into
an Apple Store and plunk down your money, though you apparently might be able to find one at a handful of boutique shops. Many of the folks who pre-ordered won't get
their timepieces until May or June.
Still, some lucky
people are receiving their pre-ordered watches today. And I've already had a
little bit of wrist time with the Apple Watch myself. To be specific, I've been
trying a 42mm stainless-steel model with a fancy chain-link "Milanese
loop" band that Apple loaned to me. (I also got a rubbery green sport band
that is a cinch to swap in, thanks to Apple's push-button band-release system.)
I should underline the
"little bit of time" part of that previous paragraph: It's been less
than 48 hours. That's way too little time to form a final verdict on a major
tech product—especially one as new and ambitious as this one. The New
York Times' Farhad Manjoo saidit took him
"three long, often confusing and frustrating days" before he figured
out the watch and became smitten with it; by that timetable, I'm less than
halfway in.
Consider what follows
to be a status report rather than a review. But I've learned quite a bit
already that I didn't get from attending both of Apple's media events and
getting brief hands-on demos at them.
The Apple Watch model
I tried: stainless-steel case and Milanese loop band
At first, I was
skeptical about Apple's launch strategy for the watch, which involved offering
dozens of variations, at every price point from $349 to you-can't-buy-one—all of which do exactly the same thing. It
certainly didn't seem like a move in the Apple tradition of launching a
solitary computer or phone or tablet that gave the world precisely what Apple thought it needed.
The sport band's end
tucks neatly into a slot.
Having spent more than
a day with the 42mm steel Apple Watch, plus some additional hands-on time with
other models and a variety of straps, I get it. As a piece of fashion-minded
hardware, everything about the watch already seems to be in place. (Okay, one
exception; It's chunkier than you'd want it to be if the electronics and
battery inside didn't matter.) Even tiny little details such as the way the
bands fasten to the watch and secure themselves on your wrist show style and
ingenuity. The range of case materials, colors, and band styles makes the watch
customizable in a way that few pieces of personal technology have ever been.
The near-infinite
variety of Apple Watch options feels like a warning shot against the bow of the
entire industry. You can imagine other technology companies, from Google to
Pebble, coming up with smartwatch software that rivals what Apple is doing. And
maybe some experienced manufacturer of timepieces will produce smartphone hardware
that rivals Apple's for design panache. But it's tough to imagine any one
company doing both, and doing it in so many versions.
Even though Apple
isn't declaring that any specific Apple Watch model is aimed at men or at
women, it seems likely that many gents will opt for the 42mm size I tried, and
many ladies will prefer the daintier 38mm variant.
Even the larger 42mm
is not, by smartwatch standards, abiiiiig watch—at least in
comparison to monsters such as Samsung's Gear S. At 42mm by 35.9mm by 10.5mm, it's a smidge
larger than the Pebble Steel, and doesn't look ridiculous on my wrist.
In a canny move I
didn't really appreciate until now, Apple made the bezel of the watch black and
gave the software an interface that's mostly white and bright colors on a black
background. That makes the line between screen and bezel nearly seamless, which
allows Apple to get away with very little display border. End result: It feels
like a surprisingly large screen given the size of the watch.
A very small, very
high-resolution display presents opportunities for app developers that
smartphones and tablets do not. Every pixel matters, and nobody's going to try
to build a watch app with gazillions of features, opening up the possibility to
focus on artistry as much as functionality.
In some ways, the most
impressive app I've seen so far is the Mickey Mouse watch face: Mickey looks
like he was drawn with pen and ink, and I haven't yet tired of studying the
changes in his pose as he genially keeps time.
Apple isn't exactly a
company that typically goes out of its way to let its customers tweak its
products' interfaces. But most of the 10 watch faces that the Apple Watch
offers let you play with colors, design elements, and the items that watch nuts
calls "complications"—basically, any information beyond the time of
day. (Apple Watch complications include the date, your next calendar
appointment, a summary of your fitness, and other items.) It's slick and fun,
and I really hope that Apple allows third-party developers to create
complications that plug into its watch faces.
I've been using Apple Pay on my iPhone nearly every day since it launched in October
When it works as advertised—almost always, in my experience—it's faster than
cards or cash. It's even simpler on the watch. You don't need to pull anything
out of your pocket, and the required gesture—pressing the side button twice to
put the watch into Apple Pay mode, then holding it to the payment terminal—is
easier to pull off without thinking about it than using the iPhone's Touch ID
sensor. You can even trigger Apple Pay mode while you're waiting in line to
check out.
Like every other
smartwatch with a vibrant, illuminated color screen—Apple used OLED
technology—the Apple Watch must obsess over power usage to get you through the
day on a single charge. It therefore keeps its screen off when you're not using
it. When its sensors notice you've turned it up toward your eyes in an
orientation that suggests you're ready to do something, the display turns on.
Except in my
experience, it sometimes didn't. Flicking my wrist exuberantly sometimes did
the trick. In other instances, I couldn't get it to shake out of its slumber
except by pressing the digital crown or touching the screen. Then again, maybe
I move my wrist funny: Over at Mashable, my friend Lance
Ulanoff reports that this feature worked
"flawlessly" for him.
Even when the watch
does wake up on its own, there's always been a half-beat during which I'm
looking at the screen but it hasn't yet turned on. It's as if the software
wants to make absolutely sure I'm trying to use the watch
before doing anything. I'm hoping Apple can make it more responsive through
future operating-system updates.
Much of the experience
is as fluid and responsive as the iPhone and iPad at their best—like when I
sweep your fingertip around on the screen full of app icons or rotate the
digital crown to zoom in on a photo. But there are also moments when I sit and
stare at the watch waiting for something to happen. Especially when it's doing
something involving using my phone as a middleman to snag information from the
Net, such as identifying my location and rendering it in Maps. Given that this
is a device designed to be used in snippets of a few seconds, any delay seems
all that much longer.
I have found the Apple
Watch to be quirky in the way that first-generation products running wildly
ambitious software almost always are. At one point, I was parked outside a
McDonald's and the watch correctly plotted my location on a map...and yet Siri
still alternated between telling me that there were no nearby McDonald's and
that it couldn't tell where I was. Another time, the watch seized up until I
did a hard reset. Judging from Apple history, I would expect this situation to
improve markedly after an operating-system update or two in the coming months.
I should have come to the
Apple Watch with a thorough understanding of Apple's force touch
technology—after all, it's also incorporated into the new MacBook that I reviewed. I found that I had to
relearn it, though. Despite knowing that the idea is that you press the screen
a bit more forcefully than usual to accomplish something—such as being able to
choose and customize watch faces—I tended to do a long press
rather than a hard one. The Apple Watch sometimes interpreted
that as a force touch, but not always.
It's important to get
the knack of doing a force touch, because—like a right-click of a PC's
mouse—the maneuver sometimes reveals important functions you might not
otherwise discover. In the Maps app, for instance, you force touch to get to
the search feature.
Instead of vibrating
furiously like other smartwatches, the Apple Watch uses Apple's
"taptic" technology to do something that feels like a genteel nudge.
It's far classier and less distracting, but especially at first, I found that I
didn't always notice it. Apple seems to acknowledge this possibility with an
option called "Prominent Haptic" that might as well have been labeled
"Furious Vibration."
The iPhone and iPad
don't have hard-wired back buttons. The Apple Watch does: Pressing the digital
crown always takes you back one step. Whenever I felt a little lost in the
interface—which, especially during the first few hours, was often—pressing the
crown got me back on track.
On the iPhone and
iPad, the touch screen is the primary means of input, and the physical home button
is secondary. That led me, instinctively, to want to swipe around the Apple
Watch screen a lot. Which you can do if you want. But really, the majority of
the watch's functionality can be triggered with the digital crown and side
button. They work wonderfully well, and it's easier to see what you're doing on
a tiny screen when your fingers aren't in the way.
Maybe this should have
been obvious all along, but it didn't dawn on me until I was out and about with
an Apple Watch on my wrist. If you're standing on the subway holding a
briefcase or backpack—a scenario I find myself in regularly—using the Apple
Watch to do anything beyond glancing at the time and incoming notifications is
going to be tricky. Other than that, though, it should be especially useful as
a walking-around computing device—that's when I find other smartwatches most
valuable.
When you get a
notification on the Apple Watch, it alerts you with a taptic tap, but doesn't
automatically turn on the screen. At first, I found that odd. Then I realized
that it's actually a really smart approach: Instead of feeling obligated to
check every single incoming notification the moment it arrived, I could
comfortably wait until I was ready to peruse them. (It also let me wear the
watch to a movie without feeling like I had a tiny spotlight on my wrist.)
When you set up a new
device—especially in a still-nascent category such as smartwatches— you
generally begin by adding stuff to it, such as apps. The Apple Watch is
different. Because it's so tightly tied to your iPhone, it automatically
mirrors much of what you've set up there, including installed apps and
notification preferences. Which is why, between Apple's own watch apps and my
iPhone apps with watch versions, my Apple Watch had more than 40 apps on it
before I proactively took measures to install anything.
That's a lot of apps.
The more detritus
that's on your Apple Watch, the harder it is to find the items you do
want—especially since neither apps nor glances are labeled. I found that the
more I winnowed down what was on the watch, the more I liked it.
Some stuff you do on
the Apple Watch, you can do without touching it—such as calling on Siri,
dictating into some apps, and making and receiving phone calls. When I was
surrounded by silence, or something close to it, these features worked
reasonably well. But background noise—be it my car's engine or people in my
coworking space chattering nearby—sometimes made using these features either
impossible or impractical. Siri tended not to respond to my "Hey, Siri!"
command in noisy environments, for instance, and the maximum volume for phone
calls wasn't enough to overcome the roar of the crowd.
Watching third-party
developers figure out how to make their apps compelling in Apple Watch form is
going to be a blast. There's no guarantee, however, that their approach to
shrinking down their functionality is going to be the same one you'd choose.
The Twitter app, for
instance, lets you view your timeline and trending tweets, but doesn't seem to
include any way to view a list of replies to your tweets. Maybe Twitter thinks
that offering iOS notifications takes care of that. I'd prefer to leave Twitter
notifications off and peruse feedback on my tweets at my leisure. (Twitterific's Apple Watch app comes
far closer to my way of thinking.)
Another example: The
Instapaper app is essentially a remote control that you can use to make your
iPhone read articles out loud in a robotic text-to-speech voice. I have no
interest in doing that. But I'd love to be able to skim articles I've saved
right on the watch's screen.
The watch's easy-on,
easy-off band-attaching system—you push a little button on the back of the
watch, then slide the band on or off—makes the idea of dressing this timepiece
up with a variety straps or bracelets for different occasions irresistible.
Apple is encouraging that idea by selling bands separately. But with the
exception of its $50 sport bands, all of the ones it's offering are $150 or
more. Nice though they are, collecting them would be a rich person's hobby.
With conventional
watches, it's possible to buy attractive leather bands for as little as 15 or
20 bucks. I'm hoping that some of the companies in that business, such as
Hadley Roma, are drawing up plans to offer Apple Watch bands even as we speak.
As a long-suffering southpaw, one of the happiest moments of the first Apple Watch event
back in September was when I learned that Apple had given the watch a mode
designed for left-handed people—one that let you wear it on your right hand
with the digital crown and side button rotated around to the left-hand edge of
the case for easy access.
Having worn the Apple
Watch that way, I'm happy to report that it mostly works fine, and that it
doesn't matter that the side button is up top and the digital crown is below.
There is one minor exception, though: When I pressed the side button twice, it
didn't always put the watch into Apple Pay. Eventually, I figured out that I
was angling my thumb in from above to avoid brushing the digital crown—and that
when I did so, the watch had trouble registering my double-press. When I taught
myself to reach in from below, it worked every time.
Glancing repeatedly at
your watch in the presence of others has never been considered a particularly
endearing trait. (Just ask George H.W. Bush.) If the Apple Watch is a blockbuster, will
that change? Maybe: As past gadgets such as cell phones became pervasive, our
sense of good and bad manners adjusted to accommodate them. But all I know for
sure right now is that I went out for ramen with my wife last night and didn't
feel comfortable being too fixated on my Apple Watch—even though she's a Pebble Steel owner and would presumably have understood.
As my colleague Ross
Rubin has written, there's no one obvious reason why someone
would want the Apple Watch—or at least not one which Apple has articulated.
Instead, it feels like Apple, third-party developers, and consumers are going
to figure out where this device goes as a team. That makes it distinctly
different from the original versions of the iPhone and iPad, both of which
exuded clarity of vision from day one.
I'm sure that the
people whose Apple Watches are arriving even as we speak are going to have fun
with them. But within the next few months, Apple is going to swat the biggest
bugs, and the third-party app situation should improve dramatically. (Most of
the apps launching alongside the watch were written by developers who didn't actually have the
watch.) Which means that the Apple Watch is only going to get better—and the
longer you wait, the more fully baked it's going to get.
BY HARRY MCCRACKEN
http://www.fastcompany.com/3045391/tech-forecast/21-things-i-didnt-know-about-the-apple-watch-until-i-started-wearing-one
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