A day with the Apple Watch
- 40% battery left at midnight after a weekend’s day trip out of town, over my expectations
- Slow-ish. Everything takes a second to load
- It’s nice. Get it. But you don’t need it
- Probably not worth 399+tax.
- and a surprising 3rd day update...
I was lucky to both order late and receive it on the launch day even though it was supposed to come in May. So I just spent 24h with the Sport Apple Watch and blue fluoroelastomer band. Here’s what I found.
First off, the packaging it comes in is big. I mean it. It’s huge, about the size of a bottle of wine. It’s clear Apple wants you to feel this thing is valuable, precious. The polycarbonate case inside the packaging is so beefy, heavy and well made I felt sorry that was the only and last time it got used.
The hardware looks very detailed, the band feels nicely soft and it all just screams quality. But not finesse. The glass is easily smudged and with the screen off all the time you’ll see the grease. It’s overall smaller, more delicate and elegant than the Pebble, but when the screen is off it just looks like a weird black gem bracelet.
I set up the watch up while driving from Butte County to San Francisco. I had time. I basically just let it do its thing. iPhone transferred all the apps that were optimized automatically. I used it to ask Siri to give me directions straight away. It’s great and I could get used to it. But I wish the maps were Google’s.
Throughout the day I used Maps, Strava for hiking and messaging (especially dictating messages). I paid for coconut water at Whole Foods with Apple Pay. And I’m looking forward to boarding the plane tomorrow by scanning the QR on the watch.
Paying, sadly, isn’t a simple deal. You’ll need to turn it on, go to the apps, find and open Passbook (not so easy, weirdly), select the card and double press the side button. In this time you may have tapped the iPhone on the POS while holding the finger on the Touch ID sensor and most definitely be done by the time you were looking for Passbook on the watch. A double click on the secondary button would suffice to put Watch in pay mode, but that wasn’t immediately obvious. Much like the entire input system.
I was pleasantly surprised by the battery life. I think today will turn out to be a pretty typical use day moving forward, so it’s probably reasonable to expect a circa two-day battery life off the thing. It’s still days behind my outgoing Pebble that had an always on screen, but I’m willing to put up with it.
It’s nice and it will probably grow on me. But I can’t help thinking all this is because I have to justify spending so much Dollar on it.
Three days later my Apple Watch is worn by someone who I hope will enjoy it more than I did.
These past few days I was traveling for business, driving and flying across continents, an amazing opportunity to prove the watch’s utility and versatility out of the mundane. I used directions, made calls, payments, travel documents, airplane boarding, Uber-ing, messaging, getting weather, notifications et al. And it’s sortof great. But also finicky, tacky and not really that useful for any specific purpose at all. It’s also not really elegant or that good looking either, and instead of a style icon Ive and Seymour hoped to create, it’s really a geek’s better designed watch.
By direct comparison, my old Pebble is raw and unrefined, but also honest in both its capability and style. The battery lasts a comfortable 4-5 days, it’s functionality is similar at the core and it can actually display the time continuously.
My definite thoughts of the Apple Watch: too expensive for too little - and questionable - functionality; with a poor battery life. I gave up.
