Review: Apple Watch

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla 

Apple Watch offers a distillation of the iPhone’s hallmark features so users can opt to use their iPhones less. The Watch can make or take calls, receive notifications, as well as get mirrored push alerts just like the competitor’s devices, but it can also do so much more.

Apple’s newest product category represents various milestones for the company. It’s the first new product category to come out of Cupertino under Tim Cook as CEO. It is the first major project undertaken by Jony Ive without Steve Jobs, it is the company’s first wearable and it is seen as the necessary replacement to the diminishing iPod product line.

Overview

The importance of the Watch to Apple can’t be overlooked. They chose to launch it alongside the highly successful iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus at the Flint Centre in Cupertino, where the original Mac was launched and also the iMac. Apple clearly sees this as a transformative product, one that’s expected to follow in the footsteps of its more iconic creations.

Apple Watch comes to a market saturated with fitness trackers, cheap fashion watches that serve up smartphone notifications, and three generations of Android Wear powered devices from the likes of Motorola, Samsung, Sony, ASUS, LG and dozens more.

Despite the recent deluge of wearables, smart watches as a category haven't really taken off in any significant way. Pebble, long considered the leading smart watch maker has sold 1 million units in the three years its products have been in the market. There's not telling how many Android Wear devices are out there, since they're all made by different manufacturers.

Unlike the competition, which will have one model variant (albeit with two or three different colours), Apple Watch is being launched in two sizes as three different editions, each with corresponding materials and finishes catering to a different type of end user.

The model I am reviewing is the Watch Sport Edition, the most affordable of the line, which starts just at around CAD $500 after taxes for the smaller 38mm case.

Canadians were able to preorder the Apple Watch as part of the countries included in the first wave of availability and the excitement for this device has been rather high.

Despite a higher price due to exchange rates, high-demand and a prolonged shipping schedule, anticipation for Apple Watch has been in similar to that of previous Apple devices.

The Competition

The advantage of Apple Watch over competitors like Pebble and Android Wear is the tight integration with existing and mature Apple ecosystems. There’s iOS and its multifarious functions, apps and features, as well as new Handoff and Continuity features that extend the iPhone’s capabilities to the small, yet surprisingly capable Watch.

In many ways, Apple Watch offers a distillation of the iPhone’s hallmark features so users can opt to use their iPhones less. The Watch can make or take calls, receive notifications as well as get mirrored push alerts just like the competitor’s devices, but it can also do so much more.

Using voice dictation, Digital Touch as well as the touch screen and the Digital Crown, the Watch offers an expansive range of interactivity and communication acumen.

Its symbiosis with the iPhone is another important feature that is unmatched in any wearable-smartphone combination in the mobile industry and likely a good reason to suck in potential switchers into the iPhone fold.

What amazed me the most about using the Apple Watch was how easy it was for the iPhone to fade in the background for a variety of the tasks, which the Watch handles rather well.

While I wouldn’t peek at my Watch during a meeting, the subtle Taptic alerts make me conscious of incoming alerts, which I can quickly check on with a few gestures.

While watching a movie last week, the Watch kept me apprised to incoming messages, but in a way that was not annoying or invasive to the moviegoers around me.

While riding the train, I couldn’t help but see almost everyone buried in their smartphone screens, I was able to check messages, mail, weather and sports scores on the Watch with a few taps and scrolls. 

Even when my son is using my iPhone to watch a video, I still get notifications on the Watch and can send quick replies easily or access various apps to get weather, news and social media feeds.

I love my iPhone, but I love the fact that I don’t need to be immersed in it all the time and that’s because of the Watch.

Busy people who are bogged down by constant mail, messages and interactions can triage their communications on the watch and even delete or archive less important messages. I can see this as a time saver for slicing through one’s inbox, even before one gets to the office. 

Incoming voice calls can be routed to the Watch and quality and loudness is ample for most situations. 

The Siri voice assistant, easily one of the most overlooked features of the Apple mobile ecosystem, really shines on Apple Watch as one of the quickest means to access information on the Internet, enable navigation, call someone and even open an app. Siri can also be used to ask questions, search the web, play music, gather movie showing information, timer, calendar and phone settings.

Siri on Apple Watch is currently the feature that I use most and has been most accurate. In the event that Siri can't figure out requets, she will Handoff to the iPhone which usually means a search results page.

Using the ‘Hey Siri,’ voice command to invoke the voice assistant felt strange at first, but is now natural and second nature to me because it is the fastest way to get anything done on the Watch.

Because Siri doesn’t have to talk back, responses come in text form and are quite fast. 

Watch: What it is 

Apple Watch is a precision timepiece, it keeps time within 50ms of the definitive global time standard—the Coordinated Universal Time using the iPhone’s various wireless connections. If you place various Apple Watches in a row together, they will all have the exact time down to the seconds.

Apple Watch is a music player, it can play stored MP3’s on Bluetooth headsets, just perfect for going on a run without your phone. The specs of Apple Watch are quite impressive for such a small device. It has a bespoke Apple S1 processor that has 512MB of RAM and 8 GB of storage as well as a bevy of sensors, radios and other controllers.

The Watch is a health and activity tracker. It constantly checks your heart rate, measures movement and activity and will even remind you to get off your ass every hour or so. When engaged as an advanced activity tracker, it can accurately determine your level of activity whether you’re on a machine or outdoors running.

Using it while on my elliptical, I could see how many calories I was burning, how my pace was going, and how much longer I had to go.

I got an alert at the hallway point of my routine which allowed me to speed up and maximize my remaining time.

The Watch can be a mobile payments solution, using a built-in NFC chip, Apple’s PassBook and Apple Pay functionality, users can use their Watch to pay for products and services.

In Canada, you can use it to buy coffee from Starbucks. Fingers crossed, we should see ApplePay accepted in the country by the end of the year.

The Watch can access hotel rooms where supported, serve up a boarding pass for your next Air Canada flight, work as a remote control for your Apple TV, it can monitor and start Tesla electric cars, it can send your heartbeat to a loved one and it can send an alert to your iPhone in the event that you misplace it.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg.

Design

If Apple’s VP for Design Jony Ive retired today and no longer made anything new, there would be a long list of products that would be considered as his very best designs. The Apple Watch would most definitely need to be in that conversation. 

Designed to be friendly and personal yet capable of complex functionality (while still being eminently Apple-like and intuitive), the Apple Watch pays homage to the lofty art of watchmaking but at the same time pushes it forward to the future. 

Yes, it is a smart watch. Yes, it is disposable, or at least compared to an heirloom 18k Santos de Cartier or well-worn Omega Constellation, the Apple Watch of 2015 isn’t going to have a whole lot of value in 15 or 20 years at estate auctions.

The amount of attention to detail to design, construction and materials poured into it belies the Apple Watch’s inevitable ephemerality.

Lovers of Apple products know all about the razor-focus, the attention to detail, the constant struggle with creating an even simpler and purer version of a product until it is the best that it can be. 

For the Watch, that Apple obsessiveness has been turned up to 11. Apple hired various luminaries of the fashion and design world, they added famed industrial designer Marc Newson to the team to help refine the vision of the Watch and make it more marketable as a fashion item.

We have also seen Apple’s executives step out of their comfort zone, attending fashion events and showing off the Watch at every occasion prior to the launch.

 

Apple invented new machining and production processes for the Watch. They created new alloys, laced some models with aircraft grade scratch resistant glass, others with invulnerable Sapphire crystal.

They devised a Taptic Engine to replicate a human tap, a Digital Crown to serve as a familiar yet vastly improved mode of control for apps and functions.

As an object, the Apple Watch is by far the most premium looking smart watch in the market today. I've used Pebbles as well as the Moto 360 and while I was delighted to play with their functionality and features I found I could live days or even weeks without missing what they had to offer. I have yet to spend weeks with the Watch but its stickiness is evident. It's the first thing I put on in the morning, even before I grope around for my glasses.

The display is a stunning and richly saturated OLED screen with the deepest blacks and very bright colours while still being power efficient. This is one of the nicest displays on any consumer electronics product and has sold me on the merits of OLED display technology.

My Apple Watch Sport edition is made out of lightweight aluminum (30 per cent lighter than the stainless steel Watch), yet it is finished in a muted satin hue that’s supposed to be scratchproof.

It is also water resistant and can survive rainfall and splashing but I woudn't go swimming or take a shower with it. 

 

The Silver Aluminum Watch Sport bears a striking resemblance to the original iPhone, which also had similar curves and smooth edges. This is one of the reasons I prefer the look of the aluminum sport to other editions.

The Sport Band, which is made of a special fluoroelastomer material is soft and comfortable, I ended up ordering a black version of the Sport Band just because the baby blue is a little infantile for the wardrobe of a man my age.

That’s the whole idea, the Watch can be changed to suit anyone’s personality, mood or need. For a price.

I find the nicer accessory bands to be rather pricey, but most users will likely want a more formal leather or metal band as well as a functional and durable sport band for their watch.

The good news is Apple has  guidelines for Made for Watch accessories which should offer a wider choice and likely better pricing.

While it is reasonably sized, the squircle shape of the 42mm Watch is comfortable and does not get caught in jackets or snagged when you have your hand in your pocket. Since it is so light, I often forget it is there.

I like the fact that the Watch knows when it is being removed and also requests for a four-digit PIN password after it senses it has been removed. It's added security but for such a personal device, it is necessary.

The rear case, which is finished with a solid ceramic Zirconia, features the heart rate sensor as well as the charging area which slips into the included inductive charger. The charger itself is a simple plastic disc connected to a USB port.

The Taptic Engine makes itself useful as a silent means of getting alerts. You can also use the Watch to navigate while in a car. Instead of reaching for an iPhone  you can use Siri on the Watch to get to a location and the taptic feedback lets you know when you need to turn by sounding like a turn-signal light. 

Apple could have really wowed users with a proper charging stand, or a way to display the watch while it restores power, but I guess they had to cut corners somewhere. The upside is that the charging port is quite portable.

Even the Sport edition offers an exacting degree of fit and finish that didn’t make me feel like I was missing out on the costlier Apple Watch or Edition editions. The inside components as well as the range of functionality of the Watch is identical across the three editions, and all the bands are pretty interchangeable.

Interface

Apple created a new user interface designed around the smaller screen. They created a new font called San Francisco, which is an efficient typeface that is easy to read even in smaller font sizes.

You can use direct touch, the Digital Crown and voice dictation via Siri to issue commands, communicate with your friends and family as well as tap into bite-sized vignettes of news, stocks, social media as well as whatever apps are on the iPhone which have corresponding Watch apps.

A large component of the Apple Watch is the corresponding iPhone Apple Watch App, this is where you can fine tune the settings and applications as well as access new applications on the Watch specific store.

As expected, the store looks very much like a typical App store. Personalization and granular control over the apps, notifications as well as various settings are done through this app.

Watch faces have been a huge feature of smart watches since the beginning.

For Apple Watch, you have the ability to choose from various preset faces, you can customize some of these faces and change the colour and the elements of these faces.

You can also add ‘complications’ which are widgets like alarms, moon phases, a visual representation of the activity tracker and weather information.

From your watch face screen, you can swipe down to check and act on notifications.

You can swipe up to access ‘Glances’ which are snapshots of some apps (i.e. battery life, calendar, activity, weather, stocks, maps and other third party apps).

The included faces are very nice and even whimsical, but for users who are coming from Android Wear, which offers an unlimited range of third-party watch faces, the Apple Watch might seem limiting.

What if you want to put up the logo of your favourite team, superhero or copy the face of a Panerai or Patek Philippe timepiece? Not going to happen.

Apple will likely add more faces but those will need to fit the right scale and proportion (and aesthetic, for the Watch).

‘Apps’

 

The apps situation on Apple Watch right now is a mixed bag. There are no native Watch Apps aside from the ones that Apple has included with the hardware.

The rest of the 'apps' available are actually extensions to iPhone apps and services. Once you pair a Watch to your iPhone, you have the option of getting the corresponding watch extensions installed on your watch.

This isn’t a bad thing, since the Watch is a satellite of the phone and can mirror and condense a lot of the functionality that the apps on the phone offer.

There are 3,000 applications that have Watch components. Credit this to Apple’s early release of the WatchKit framework which makes it possible for any developer to extend the functionality of their iOS apps to the Watch. Various Canadian companies are onboard with the likes of TD, CIBC, Scotiabank, Pizza Pizza and many others extending functionality to the wearable.

The native apps offered by Apple work better and seem more efficient and faster to deploy.

Some of that third party apps can be laggy, so there’s a loading icon that sometimes seems to take forever to resolve (the Watch display often goes black before any content shows up). This gets better the more you use an app and the library of information is filled up.

Granted, most developers used emulators rather than actual Watches to develop these widgets, it will take some fine tuning to make the experience feel more fluid.

The Watch itself is running WatchOS version 1.0 and knowing Apple, there should be a series of updates to improve overall performance as well as add new functionality. That said, most users will be satisfied with the range of apps available today.

Battery life

One of the biggest limitations to the wearables space is battery life.

I’ve had the Watch for nearly a week and its been on me from the moment I wake up at 7:30 am until the moment I go to sleep. I’ve been getting a full-day’s use with an extra 30 per cent of battery left at around 11:30 pm.

I use Watch mostly for voice calls, messaging, checking the weather, appointments, Siri-ing information and setting alarms, for working out and tracking health. Even during a particularly heavy day, I am confident that the Watch will last, even if it goes into Power Reserve mode (which cuts out all functionality except for timekeeping for around 72 hours).

As for the iPhone, I haven’t noticed a dramatic decrease in battery life. Possibly because I am handling it less now that the Watch has become my go-to option for a majority of day-to-day functions.

A buyer’s guide and conclusion

 

I am an avowed lover of timepieces. I have a modest collection of 1960s and 1970s Omega Seamasters, the 90s James Bond (Brosnan) 007 Seamaster, an heirloom Santos de Cartier and I just recently bought a 47mm Shinola Runwell, and I love it.

Watches are important to me as functional jewellery as well as fashion accents and investments. I’ve tried every smart watch and almost every fitness tracker released in the last four years and mostly had both a watch and a FitBit or a JawBone concurrently. Watches give me pleasure, fitness trackers serve a purpose. Apple Watch does both exceptionally well.

The Apple Watch is the first product that eliminates my need to carry both devices. I’m confident enough in the health tracking functionality to know that it is reliable and the timekeeping is spot on.

As for the connected functionality, mirroring the iPhone and apps, these are all pleasant niceties but I haven’t really found a single killer app I keep coming back to. The Watch really offers a range of experiences that are delightful, convenient, thoughtful and have actually earned me back pockets of time throughout the day.

The elegance of the Apple Watch is its seamless symbiosis with the iPhone and as a result, the iPhone’s ecosystem. I doubt you’ll find this in any other smart watch, smartphone and OS combination. Apple Watch makes sense for my needs because it helps me better access functionality I am already used to.

This might not be the case for all users but anyone already heavily invested in their iPhone and apps will likely transition to an Apple Watch quite easily. The Watch can be a transformative technology and maybe just short of game changing.

Users of fitness trackers and watches, especially those who like smart watches, finally have a singular product that can offer a lot of the functionality they are looking for. Serious runners who depend on GPS will need to take their iPhones with them for accurate mapping but otherwise, the Apple Watch is a solid and capable standalone device.

The Apple Watch Sport edition seems to represent the purest ideal of what a smart, connected and personal Apple wearable has to offer, and would be a wise choice for anyone wanting to indulge and invest in a first-generation Watch to go with their iPhone 5, iPhone 5s/5c or iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus. 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5