REVIEW: If I look at my Apple Watch for longer than five seconds I get annoyed with it. An app won't load. Siri will have no idea what I just said. I'll walk into something because I'm staring at a tiny screen on my wrist. It's hard enough to wait for something to load these days, but when you have decades of muscle memory telling you that "the time is always instantly available on your wrist" waiting is almost painful.
Luckily, most of my interactions with the Apple Watch take less than five seconds. I check the time, the temperature, and my next appointment - in one glance. I see an email that I don't care about it and swipe it away into the void. I check a bank balance, or change the song, or tell it I've finished a pathetic attempt at working out. When I use the Apple Watch like this I almost forget its there, only it's so nifty I can't.
I've had an aluminium midrange Apple Watch on for two weeks now. I've exercised with it, attempted to match it to various outfits, and tried around a whole bundle of "apps". I think almost everyone could get used to and end up quite liking the Apple Watch, but I don't think it's a device that everyone should shell out hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for. You need a smartphone; you don't need this.
Then, for a specific type of person - someone who is time-poor, who has to deal with multiple competing streams of information every day - the Watch is lifesaver. It's also an excellent fitness wearable, and, to be honest, a really fun toy. A device doesn't have to be essential for you to want it. This is capitalism baby.
HOW DOES IT FEEL ON YOUR WRIST?
Unlike most products, the Watch is much better in person than in ads. When you scale it to your own body the two sizes (38mm and 42mm) seem sensible. The actual block of the watch doesn't protrude from your wrist as much as you would think, and if you wear it for long enough you almost forget it's there. The digital crown is smooth, the button is, well, a button, and while the back of the watch is very pretty, you'll barely ever see it. Really, the watch does its job in just feeling like a well designed touchscreen on your wrist, not flashy jewellery. It doesn't feel cheap but it doesn't feel as expensive as it is either. It's a screen, it's on your wrist - try to forget about it.
Unlike normal watches and many other smartwatches, the Apple Watch displays nothing on screen when inactive. You prompt it to show you the time by raising or turning your wrist in any perceptible way - the accelerometer picks it up - or by tapping the screen. This is, of course, to save battery. The activation process isn't as jarring as it sounds, but it's not perfect, and it also makes it extremely obvious that you are checking the time. If you are used to subtly glancing at the time with your regular watch you are out of luck, which is a real pain.
For those of us who aren't blowing tens of thousands of dollars on an 'Edition', the various straps for the Watch are where they become personal, become customised and materially interesting to interact with. Apple aren't used to trying out this many ideas at once, so they've had a bit of fun here, with quite simple design ideas alongside quite complex ones.
I tried out four varieties of strap with the midrange (not Edition, not Sport) 42mm Watch I have: the fluoroelastomer sport band, the aluminium milanese loop, the link bracelet, and the 'classic buckle' leather. You can see all the varieties here, but really this is a matter of taste. I find the leather a bit garish and the link bracelet a bit 'look at me I'm just like a regular watch'. The milanese loop is made up of a thick stainless steel loop and looks and feels much more pricey than it is, but it also seems a touch shiny for how I usually dress.
What I ended up loving more than any other strap was the cheapest one they have - the 'Sport' strap. It's a lot less rubbery than it looks, and its stripped back simplicity makes it suit the newness of the Apple Watch in a way the other straps don't. The sport strap acknowledges that this is not a regular watch, while many of the other options feel like they're an attempt to ease newcomers into the wearable world. It feels vaguely 80s, that is, vaguely futuristic. I put mine on for a workout two days into using the watch and had to make myself take it off to try others - it just felt right.
WHERE THE SOFTWARE SHINES
As I said earlier, the Watch is blissful to use when you are barely using it.
The endlessly customisable watch faces let you create something much more useful and beautiful than your phones home screen . Mine shows me the analogue time, the day and date, the time in New York, the temperature outside, and my next calendar appointment - yet it somehow doesn't feel cluttered. For me, a quick reminder that I have a thing to do in twenty minutes is incredibly useful. For you, more intimate knowledge of the moon cycles may be a boon. There's a lot there.
Then there's notifications. The Apple Watch will subtly vibrate against your wrist about anything your phone can, but there's granular control to nail that balance between annoying and necessary. You can dismiss any notification, and act on many of them - sending a quick text back ("yes" "no" "on my way"), answering a phone call, snoozing an alarm, favouriting a tweet. The potential isn't quite built in enough here - you can respond to a Facebook message with a "thumbs up" and nothing else, and the texts you can send back are uncustomisable, so I can't reply with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in seconds, but luckily, most notifications don't need acting on. Most just need dismissing, which is easy.
I get a lot of garbage notifications. Quickly dismissing them on my wrist instead of taking out my phone and then regretting the time wasted in taking it out is my favourite thing to do on the Watch. It doesn't break into whatever I'm doing, I glance, decide I don't care, and swipe away, instead of leaving my real life to pull a slab of technology from deep in my pocket.
Finally: glances. These are kind of like widgets only not quite as gaudy. My Westpac one allows to me quickly glance at the balance of one of my accounts, the 'music' one lets me skip or pause a song, and the 'activity' one lets the watch guilt trip me for not exercising. But we'll get into that later. The glances work. I don't know what else to say. You can get to them very quickly by swiping up and then forget them just as easily.
It's when you press the digital crown in and go to that mess of app icons that things fall apart.
WHERE THE SOFTWARE SUCKS (RIGHT NOW)
The Apple Watch doesn't really have 'apps', not yet. It looks like it does - you press the crown in and you see a screen covered in icons! - but those aren't apps. Those are slow ways to use the apps that you have on your phone. Slow and mostly frustrating.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool that I can see my Twitter timeline on my wrist, but it takes five or six seconds just to open the app. The Instagram app has a bug where it constantly tells you your photo has one more comment that it actually does. There's no browser, so you're out of luck if anyone sends you a link to anything. Shazam and the New York Times which are well designed smooth experiences but they still take too many seconds to load.
The problem is that no non-Apple apps are actually native to the watch yet. They are more like bastardised widgets for apps on your iPhone. Apple will allow watch-native apps in watch OS2 which should come out in September, and this could really change things - but at the end of the day its not the biggest deal. If there's something I want to do that will take longer than five seconds I probably want to pull out my phone any way.
Oh and don't even talk to me about these. Don't. Please.
FITNESS
Apart from dismissing notifications, I had the most fun with the watch with its built in 'activity' features. The intricacies of the three daily circles and the workout app really deserve their own article, and this one is getting very long, but let me lay out the basics.
Apple's activity app has three different circles where it tracks three different things - minutes exercised, standing time, and calories burnt. Whenever you do one of these things you complete a little bit of the circles, which reset every day. You can double and triple complete them if you are a crazy person, and even get trophy-like achievements for multi-day streaks etc.
As anyone who has played a video game is the last decade can tell you, achievements are a powerful thing. "Gasification" of our organic experience is weird, sure, but it also made me run up and down the steps near my house for 20 minutes at the end of another run so I would complete a goal for the day.
The calorie goal is generally the hardest circle to fill. When you first set up the watch you give it some basic information about your weight and height, and it determines how many calories you should attempt to burn off every day, but you can change it. This calorie goal works in tandem with a built in workouts app, which is great at measuring cardio workouts but has understandable trouble understanding anything else.
The exercise circle is set at 30 minutes of exercise a day - and it counts that slovenly walk across your office as exercise, so one is quite hard to not complete.
Third is the 'standing' circle, which is kind of weird, but a cool idea. The goal is set at 12 hours a day - not 12 full hours of standing, but 12 hours in which you stood up for a small chunk of that hour. If you're sitting for a while, the watch pings you and suggests you stand for a while, which is sometimes a good idea (I need a drink of water, actually) and sometimes a pain (I'm in bed, shut up).
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Apple Watch is not the perfect wearable. I don't feel like a cyborg at all. After two weeks I still interact with it on a purpose, not as instinct.
That is probably okay for now. It's plenty of fun. Swiping away a notification on my wrist feels much more natural and pleasurable than doing same thing on this gigantic oblong in pocket. I can glance at the time and my next appointment about as easily as I can clench a fist.
But there's also this: I wouldn't be at all afraid of taking off my watch and leaving it at home tomorrow. I think I would get through my day fine. If I left my phone at home that wouldn't be the case. This is a 1.0 product, yes, but I'm still not sure that more than a select group of people will want to 2.0, or the 3.0. It's a fun and different gadget experience, one that proves the potential for wearables going forwards - but a lot of people might be fine to buy a FitBit and call it a day.
So should you buy one? Well, okay - if you've got an iPhone, love it, but wish you weren't on it so much: consider it. If you just have to deal with a lot of emails and notifications and appointments: consider it. If you just think they look pretty: consider it. But you don't need one. Nobody does.
