Continuing on from last week’s Apple Watch review, and I’m just shy of two weeks of total ownership of the Apple Watch. As predicted, the Apple Watch is getting better, as an update released on Tuesday went a long way to address my primary concern of the Apple Watch requiring way too obnoxious of an arm gesture to activate. Unfortunately, Apple adjusted this functionality The Apple Way which anyone who has had an iOS device is no doubt familiar with. What I mean by that is the activation sensitivity still isn’t adjustable by the user, and wasn’t even mentioned in the patch notes. I was pretty sure I was just crazy until a bunch of people on different forums also said they noticed it was way easier to activate following the update.
What sucks about this is for The Most Personal Device Ever I feel like you should be able to personally decide what level of sensitivity you want the Apple Watch to have for screen activation. It makes too much sense to have a slider somewhere (similar to haptics strength) that allows you to adjust from straight up not turning on until you tap the screen to turn on at the slightest movement. I feel like most people’s sweet spots for activation likely would be totally different, and it sucks that everyone essentially gets railroaded down what Apple thinks the best setting is… But, again, being around the iOS device block many times now, this is pretty normal.
As I’ve spent more time with the watch I’ve gotten deeper into customizing the way my watch works, and again I keep running into all these puzzling design decisions. One of the neat things about the watch faces of the Apple Watch is how you can scroll through the various complications shown. These range from the three circular bars that make up the activity meter, to a stopwatch or countdown timer display, and even the current moon phase. The complications I’ve found to be the most useful are the activity monitor display and the sunset time. The weather is semi-useful as well, but currently this data can only be pulled from the Apple weather app which for whatever reason doesn’t seem to poll the hyper-local weather that Dark Sky grabs but instead just snatches the regional weather data. Thankfully, third party complications are rumored to be in the works, which should greatly amplify the usefulness of the watch faces themselves. The discrepancy between Dark Sky and the Apple weather app seems incredibly pedantic to point out, but that’s just a good example right now of something a third party app could do better if it had access to do so.
One thing that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense about the faces is that only certain watch faces allow for complications. From a practical standpoint, I feel like the most useful watch face is the one which shows the sun’s position in the sky. I do a lot of stuff outside, and it’s awesome to have a quick glance at how much time you’ve got left before you run out of daylight. Problem is, even though this particular watch face is full of blank space, it doesn’t support complications. I’ve gotten quite used to seeing where I’m at for the day when it comes to my activity levels every time I look at the time, and it stinks that I’m essentially forced to choose between the watch face I like best with data I find to be useful, or another watch face which doesn’t look as neat but the data I want to see. All these issues are minor, for sure, but the longer I use the Apple Watch the weirder it seems that the Most Personal Device Ever is hardly able to be personalized… At all.
On the subject of activity tracking, I’m actually really digging using the Apple Watch as an activity tracker. I typically wear a watch from when I wake up until when I go to bed, so the Apple Watch fit right in with providing really accurate daily activity data. I’ve dabbled in Fitbits before, but I always found myself sort of annoyed when I forgot to stick it in my pocket, or didn’t charge it, or something else that made me feel like I lost progress that day. I’ve never been too obsessed with step counting, but the Apple Watch’s heart rate sampling throughout the day does a fascinating job of totaling up how much active exercise you’re getting in a day that falls outside of the requisite “OK I’m doing cardio now" time. It seems like it’s a little generous with regards to what counts as a workout, as it counted all 45 minutes it took me to cut my grass which definitely is not strenuous enough for any reasonable person to consider a workout… But, on the other hand, there’s a strange feeling of validation when you carry a bunch of stuff up several flights of stairs and look at your watch to see that your workout ring incremented ever so slightly.
What’s cool about this is it all works together to figure out your daily active and resting caloric burn rate. I never know how much stock to put into all of this, as I’m currently averaging near 3,000 calories a day between just normal daily activity and working out which seems… Really high. I typically eat really clean, and if I’m allegedly burning through 3,000 calories a day I should be losing loads of weight. It’d be rad if you were somehow able to calibrate all this by having the Apple Watch utilize the data my (admittedly stupidly useless and needlessly excessive) WiFi connected scale gathers every time I step on it combined with another app to collect a detailed food/drink log to get a better picture of what your overall metabolism actually looks like. I feel like this is the direction Apple is sort of trying to go in with HealthKit eventually, but currently it results in the Apple Watch fitness data feeling just as disjointed and potentially unreliable as every other consumer-level gadgety stat tracker thing out there.
The hourly “get up and stand" alerts are pretty silly, particularly when you work from home. I try to heed the call of my wristwatch overlord and stand up whenever it tells me to, but I’m usually in the middle of something and these distractions feel more annoying than they do helpful. Additionally, the running joke on Twitter with all this is you basically just stand when it tells you to, mill around your house for a bit, then just go grab a snack out of the kitchen. I mean, you were up anyway, why not?
I’m still on the hunt for a truly useful Apple Watch app, or noteworthy Apple Watch game. Judging by the flow of emails regarding Apple Watch stuff I feel like we’re definitely in the “oh sh*t" lull of a new device coming out. Everyone very obviously shipped software without the device and no idea what would be useful, their apps turned out to range from straight up stupid to just kind of not great, and now everyone’s scrambling to release something better. At the height of Apple Watch app mania we were getting dozens of emails a day. In the last week I’ve gotten two emails about Apple Watch stuff and one of those was Kickstarter spam for yet another overpriced wooden Apple Watch stand.
It hasn’t gotten any less awkward when people ask me how I like the Apple Watch, as even two weeks in the answer hasn’t really changed. The Apple Watch seems like a really promising platform, and one day I’m sure it’ll be awesome, but I’m still struggling to find one killer feature that’d make me tell people “Oh man, you’ve got to have one of these." That will undoubtedly come with future Apple Watch OS updates and third party apps, both of which (still) just aren’t there yet.
Maybe next week.
