I have had my Apple Watch for a few days now. It hasn’t been enough time to write an exhaustive review about features, however I am not writing a full technical review. I am writing about my experience with it to date.
Physically the watch face looks ok to me. The band is a nice rubber band but its still not great. I know I bought the cheap band. Some of the other ones look much better however no super awesome band will take away from the fact that this is still a digital watch. The watch itself is pretty thick and boxy. It is well built but not beveled like someone at work pointed out. Ascetically pretty decent. Not fantastic but overall not horrible.
Someone pointed out in a review I read that the main things people will really regularly use a smart watch for is 1, telling time, 2 activity tracking, and 3 notifications. I generally agree with this. The other functions are nice to have’s but not anything that I would use often. The using the watch for example as a viewfinder for the camera is nifty but i am not going to use that very much.
Using those three main functions I wanted to see how the Apple Watch fared for me. First as a watch it wasn’t great. I was just ok. I personally had issue with the watch taking a while to go on when i moved my wrist to look at the time. It isn’t a lot of time but it is very noticible. I also don’t have the best vision so once i am looking at the watch face I have to focus on the hands to know what time it is. Most people may glance much faster at it and then the waiting for it to light up may not be a big deal. For me waiting for it to light up and then having to look at it and get the time was just too long. I know I could possibly solve my issue by just using the digital time however I have been an analog watch person for over a decade now and I don’t want to change now because the Apple Watch doesn’t turn on fast enough.
As for activity tracking I am honestly still confused by the three circles that the watch uses to track me. Move isn’t really a step count I think. I am not sure and if i can’t easily figure that out then it is too complex. Tracking my standing is cool however if the watch knows i am active why does it matter that it knows i am actually standing. My Up band alerted on lack of activity. It just seemed simpler. In any event the activity tracker seems good enough. The main issue with the watch as an activity tracker is that it is built into the watch. On one hand that is great. One less thing to wear. Of course what if I wear another watch? Or as in my case I want to track my sleep habits as well like i have been for a few years with my Jawbone UP. For me if I were to keep the watch it wouldn’t be my only watch so I would need an activity tracker anyway. My Jawbone UP24 broke last week so I just ordered a new Jawbone UP2. I will blog about that hopefully soon. In any event I am not giving up my dedicated tracker so the Apple Watch as an activity tracker is redundant for me. For others it may be great or the best function now that they can get rid of another wrist band. I for one am happy to own a basic activity tracker like the up that doesn’t have a screen on it and just tracks what i do since that is the only reason i own it.
The 3rd main reason to have a smartwatch would be the notifications. This is where my problem lies. The Apple Watch is good at this. Really good. In the few days i have had it i have loved the meeting notifications and the ability to snooze them and not forget to be somewhere. The timer is helpful also however not much easier than just dictating to Siri on my phone. Telling me about a new text was great, however there were a few that I never got on my watch but did get on my phone. Overall I liked the notification features of the watch. That in lies my problem. This watch along with all smart watches are a huge distraction or so I thought. I initially got concerned the first full day I had it when the girls were climbing all over me to play with it. I was concerned about the distraction. I am trying to adhere to be here now when I am home. Because of the distraction I was all set to return the watch. Then I read another blogger who said the notifications on the watch were great because it allowed them to keep the phone in their pocket and actually be less distracted. I was intrigued. That was exactly what I wanted. Because of that the watch got a reprieve and I will keep trying it for a while longer.