My Thoughts on the Apple Watch

I received my Apple Watch on the 11th of April and I have been wearing it ever since. Now I felt it was time to write a few lines about my experiences with this device.

Questioning the watch at a very basic level

There are many reviews around which question the watch at a very basic level. Most of these reviewers write about the fact, that the watch does not allow anything that is not also possible with a mobile phone and that they do not see a reason for putting such a device on their wrist. I fully agree on the fact that currently from the functionality point of view, the watch does not allow much more than what you could not also do with your mobile phone (well, measuring your heartbeat with the iPhone can be a bit tricky). When thinking about traditional watches, this is exactly the same issue. With a mobile phone in your pocket it is absolutely unnecessary to carry a traditional watch. However, there are still a lot of people that carry both – a mobile phone and a wristwatch. Do you see where I am getting at? The Apple Watch is exactly for everyone that wants to wear a watch (well… anti-wristwatch people are still kindly invited to try one). If you cannot stand wearing a wristwatch, then the Apple Watch will never make you happy, period.

Battery life

A widely criticized point is the battery life. For me the Apple Watch battery is still at about 40% after using the device for a full day (about 18 hours). Before I go to bed I always put my mobile phone and watch on my desk where I have built myself a little “charging station” with all the cables ready to charge my portable devices. Before the Apple Watch was released I always plugged in my mobile phone independently of its current charging state. Now that I own the Apple Watch this routine takes approximately five seconds longer since I have to place my watch on its charging pod. This works perfectly well due to the magnetic alignment between the pod and the watch. These five seconds are absolutely fine with me but if you cannot imagining doing that, do not buy the watch. Just as a side note: there are mechanical watches that cost even more and require a manual windup every day. Nobody complains about those.
I am sure that every smartwatch manufacturer is working as hard as possible to get battery time up as much as possible while not compromising too much on the user experience and I am absolutely confident that with the current devices the hardware design and optimizations are taken to their limits of what is currently possible. As we once had PCs running at 8 MHz we will one day have an Apple Watch running for weeks or months on a single charge. But this will not happen over night and will take countless of engineering hours.

Design

For me the design is simply perfect. All the curves blend into each other and form a cohesive design language across the entire device. For example you can see the same radii on the watch body as on the interface between watch and band. The system of attaching bands to the watch is simply ingenious. It does not have any weak points and works seamlessly. The entire watch feels organic and does not have any sharp edges. When looking at this product from multiple sides and distances one can tell that a lot of thinking went into the design of this product. It is simple and beautiful and wants to be touched.
The controls, the digital, the contacts button as well as the touchscreen itself work flawlessly and come up to the high standard Apple is known for. They form a combination of interaction which covers the essentials. Nothing less and nothing more.
The decision of making the watch face rectangular instead of round can look and feel weird at the beginning but feels completely natural after using it a bit. From the design point of view I can fully understand this design decision. A round screen uses more power for the same amount of “rectangular screen area” since the usable area of a round screen in the end is a square which fits into the display circle. A round screen always has some areas that are only wasting precious power because text and other UI elements cannot be displayed at the edges since it would only allow a few letters on one line or very small UI elements.

What it can do for you

Now that I have discussed the fundamental question of even wanting to wear a watch and the for me seemingly non-issue of battery life I can go ahead and write about what the watch actually can do and how it can help and support you in everyday life.

The watch

The watch still is a watch. All the features that a sophisticated watch has to offer are also supported by the Apple Watch. This includes: time, world time, stop watch, alarm and a countdown. All of these watch functions are built very nicely and obviously work seamlessly.

The smart part

Now comes the “smart” part on top of the “watch”. The watch is able to show you little pieces of information like notifications for incoming messages and emails. These work like a charm and I really like the fact, that I can “pre-filter” my communication from the wrist and decide in two seconds if I want to pick up my phone or if it can wait for the next official break.

The interactions

Interaction with the watch is also done very nicely and works like a charm. Here Siri comes into play. I often quickly tell my watch to set a timer with a defined number of hours and minutes and it works every single time. When I do that I always end up with a smile on my face since this technological feat is really astounding.

The sports

On top of that all, the fitness aspect is also working like a charm. I bought myself a nice pair of bluetooth headphones and paired it with my watch which now holds a few thousand songs (up to 2GB). After calibrating the watch once with my iPhone’s GPS, the workout app can determine the distance of my runs with an accuracy of about 100-200 meters at a total running distance of about 4-5km. That’s more than enough for me. Therefore, gone are days of carrying around a “bulky” iPhone or iPod during my workouts.

The apps

There are a number of other apps that I regularly use such as weather forecast, shopping lists, stocks etc. All of those apps work as expected and allow to quickly glance at the information without having to take out my phone (the days of walking around the mall with the iPhone in my hands in order to keep track of my shopping list are now a thing of the past). There are also other apps that I sometimes use. One of the major drawbacks of the current implementation is that the apps always need a counterpart app installed on the iPhone. The watch only hosts the UI part of the application. All the application logic still resides in the iPhone. So every time an action is triggered in an app, the information has to be computed and fetched via the bluetooth or wifi connection between the phone and the watch. This sometimes can be a little laggy but is nowhere from making it painful to use. However, Apple knew that from the beginning on and therefore was already working on an SDK for the watch when it was released back in April. It will be available later this year when Watch OS 2 will be released. We saw a very similar product and SDK rollout with the initial iPhone which in the end was a good solution for everyone. With the updated SDK developers will be able to create apps where the UI and logic run directly on the watch. This will result in more responsive apps which can do more. It is now up to the developer community to start creating awesome apps which are predestined to be used from the wrist. I see a big opportunity in the remote control of “things”. This can range from home automation to interaction with cars.

Conclusion

All in all I really like my Apple Watch and I never regretted my purchase. With the potential of future software upgrades as well as third party apps, the stage is set for this new product category. The platform is ready and it is now up to the software developers to create awesome apps. There are certainly still things that could be improved such as – yes, I’ll say it – battery life or real waterproofness but except from that the hardware seems to already be in a very mature state considering that this is a first generation product.
The most important changes and enhancements to the platform will happen on the software side. There, the single critical thing is to not simply copy iPhone apps over to the watch without thinking about the use cases. Some apps will work and make sense whereas others would be complete nonsense to be used on a tiny watch screen. Keeping this golden rule in the heads of developers will assure the success of the Apple Watch.