The first Apple Watch reviews are coming out right now. The Verge’s review is incredibly detailed, and also, brutally honest: the Apple Watch has major issues right now, but it does have a lot of potential. The biggest issue highlighted by The Verge is performance, and the video review shows stuttering, loading screens, and unregistered taps on the screen.
But right now, it’s disappointing to see the Watch struggle with performance. What good is a watch that makes you wait? Rendering notifications can slow everything down to a crawl. Buttons can take a couple taps to register. It feels like the Apple Watch has been deliberately pulled back in order to guarantee a full day of battery life. Improving performance is Apple’s biggest challenge with the Watch, and it’s clear that the company knows it.
These seem like the same issues the Moto 360 had when it first came out. Android Wear updates eventually addressed most of these issues, while also increasing its battery life, so I’m sure Apple Watch updates will do the same. Still, it’s disappointing that such an expensive, high-profile device suffers from performance issues, especially since it leads to a huge problem for the Apple Watch, highlighted perfectly by Nilay Patel: “there’s virtually nothing I can’t do faster or better with access to a laptop or a phone”.
The other major issue is one I also highlighted in my Moto 360 review and other smartwatch articles: smartwatches make you look like a jerk, and the Apple Watch is no exception.
It turns out that checking your watch over and over again is a gesture that carries a lot of cultural weight. Eventually, Sonia asks me if I need to be somewhere else. We’re both embarrassed, and I’ve mostly just ignored everyone. This is a little too much future all at once.
I worded this in the form of the funeral test (or wedding test if you’re not a cynical bastard), and it’s a crucial flaw in the entire concept of a smartwatch. It is a major weakness of Android Wear, and also of the Apple Watch, made worse by the fact that, according to The Verge, notification settings simply aren’t granular enough.
The Verge also discussed the Apple Watch with their fashion-focussed sister site Racked, and the responses weren’t particularly positive – it looks way too much like a gadget and computer, and too little like an actual fashion accessory. Of course, there are many people who have zero issues with that (I’m assuming the majority of OSNews readers do not care), but I personally do. I have enough computers and gadgets in my life, and I want my watch to look like a watch – not a computer.
The Verge eventually concludes:
There’s no question that the Apple Watch is the most capable smartwatch available today. It is one of the most ambitious products I’ve ever seen; it wants to do and change so much about how we interact with technology. But that ambition robs it of focus: it can do tiny bits of everything, instead of a few things extraordinarily well. For all of its technological marvel, the Apple Watch is still a smartwatch, and it’s not clear that anyone’s yet figured out what smartwatches are actually for.
It turns out that virtually everything I’ve said about smartwatches in the past – in my Moto 360 review as well as other smartwatch articles – remains accurate even with the introduction of the Apple Watch. It’s important to note that I am not saying smartwatches are a bad idea – just that their current incarnations – be they Wear, Pebble, or Apple Watch – are the wrong answer to the wrong question. Nobody seems to have found out yet what a smartwatch is actually supposed to be.
I said the killer feature will be the haptic notifications and the NYT review here http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/technology/personaltech/apple-wat…
says the same thing. It took him 3 days to figure out how to integrate the watch into his lifestyle and then it started to feel like magic, mainly because he no longer needed to take his phone out of his pocket for literally everything.
Eye contact. Human engagement. Quality of life. Attention span. These are the things that the watch can increase, and counter much of the smartphone addiction we all have.
In the Wired article about the watch development, Jony Ives says it himself – Apple helped create screen zombies, and apple wants to help us all move past being screen zombies.
If I can tell the wife where I’m at, or confirm/deny something, or deal with triage at work without breaking my visual concentration or making me unlock and use the smart phone, I’m all for it.
I might wait until v2 though, I’m sure they will have some kinks to work out that can’t be done in software.
How is that new? My Smartphone does the exact same thing, if it’s going to rain it vibrates three times quickly, if an email arrives it vibrates quickly 2 times, 2 slow vibrates with a text message etc.
These haptic notifications will still require you to look at your watch to see the notification, I don’t see any difference in pulling out your phone to do the same.
The watch will be even worse than a phone, it’s more easy accessible so you will look at it all day long.
My guess is though that ppl get tired of charging it all the time very quickly and it ends up in the drawer sooner or later.
I know a lot of ppl that had smartwatches, pebble or android wear and they only had them for a few weeks.
Depends on how many of those you get every day, I guess. If you get 2-3 like me, it’s probably overkill. But if you get 50+ every day, I can see a watch being much more convenient. Plus, I saw this article today on iVerge:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/8/8366841/apple-watch-apps-future
I can see these things being useful for eventually controlling lots of devices in your house, from televisions to coffee makers to fans to thermostats to stereos and everything in between.
Edited 2015-04-08 17:19 UTC
I would think that would be more voice controlled in the future, like switching on the TV or the lights by giving a voice command, or clapping your hands twice (which was already possible since I think the 80’s and for some reason is still not commonly used).
I see smart watches as 3D movies, or VR. It’s been there for so long now and it hypes now and then but it will never become mainstream.
But biggest issue right now is battery life. If I had a smart watch that could do one year on a battery and I never have to take off, not even when I go swimming or showering then maybe I would buy one.
I think that might have had something to do with the fact that those clappers were too easily triggered by false positives. It was a neat idea for its time, but tech wasn’t really up to it. We could do that much better now of course, but I suspect voice commands are the way these things will ultimately go at least where only simple commands are required because the voice recognition would have to be onboard rather than offloaded on the net. Intel’s working on making more complex voice recognition work in a limited footprint, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.
I’m sure that these things: “Eye contact. Human engagement. Quality of life. Attention span” will be solved with yet another gadget. Maybe another “social” app.
Edited 2015-04-08 18:32 UTC
Smartwatches fall into the same category as flying cars. An unimaginative mashup of separate ideas that appears cool but is an ultimately unworkable idea.
At least with flying cars you have a set of problems that the product could potentially solve. With products like smart watches, the product is created before anyone knows what problems need to be solved.
Flying cars will never happen until they are fully autonomous (and even then are unlikely to happen). You simple fact that any human controlled flying device requires a lot of training means it will never work.
Smartwatches aren’t fundamentally useless. I think Pebble is the closest here because you can actually check the time without having to wake up the display.
I think once we have e-ink displays that can refresh at 30+Hz the smartwatch will start to make sense.
Actually Pebble has. I manage my email, sms, and track my exercise and sleep. All from a $79 watch. As I’ve said before, Pebble just has to overcome the fact that Apple invented the smartwatch.
It’s a profit center in search of buyers.
And it’ll get them too, at least for a while, as long as it has that little Apple on it.
I haven’t used one yet, so I’ll reserve judgement before labelling the entire product category useless.
For notifications, location awareness, body activity monitoring, and of course time-based things, the watch seems to be the perfect platform. It was the first/only place we put information machines on our body for hundreds of years.
I’ll be much more interested when it doesn’t need to be paired with a phone in your pocket.
Apple is taking their usual new-platform approach here — focus on the simple things and let the app developers build out the demo ware.
OS interaction, quickness of use, consistency of control, usage in dark/quiet mode – these are things we can count on Apple refining further than the competitors.
It’s no wonder Apple has been leading in Assisted Interfaces. The watch is the ultimate assisted interface. It has to assume you have a tiny screen the size of your thumbnail and don’t want to hear much racket.
Smart watches as currently envisioned are as others have said, useless items to dupe the Joneses into throwing away their money.
They will continue to be useless until they actually replace a useful device entirely, and that won’t be the wristwatch. Perhaps replacing the average feature phone entirely where a wireless listening device would be in your ear is it’s proper niche with the screen the number pad so long as the battery life problems are overcome. Otherwise the screen is too small and the battery life a joke. Not everyone has or wants a smart phone despite all the hype over them.
Just like the iPod, the iPhone, & the iPad were deemed useless ripoffs for various reasons?
All were “underpowered with less than impressive specs” for v1.
None replaced an existing device, instead they added to it, or radically changed what it was capable of.
All had existing competition in the market that scoffed at Apple’s entry.
All had people shouting “why do we need this? I can already accomplish that on xyz!”
All were slammed as being toys for rich fools before they became ubiquitous computing devices.
The watch could be the hardest one for Apple to succeed in, but they have all the things needed to do so in place. They have an entire ecosystem of apps, support, retail, service, and device interaction, all marketed in a clean, stylish way.
Apple just shows their products in their ads, usually just doing what they do, edited for time, with some funky music. You know what you are getting when you buy an apple product, because they show you on the commercials and they let you play all day in the apple store (although I heard the watch might be harder to find initially).
Shut it with the historical revisionism. All those products were being hailed as the second coming of Christ by large parts of the tech press and fawning fanboys across the internet.
Some people were less impressed, and rightly pointed out that the original iPhone was years outdated with its lack of 3G (next year you get to stand in line for v. 2.0!), and fanboys lied about EDGE being faster; that the revolutionary iPad was four iPhones stitched together (it was, and still is); that the iBooks Author wouldn’t reinvent the textbook (remember that one?).
And now it seems the future of technology depends only on having ‘an entire ecosystem of apps, support, retail, service, and device interaction, all marketed in a clean, stylish way’. Or to put it more elegantly: stuff to sell on it, people to sell it, and more stuff to sell because of it, and marketing, marketing, marketing.
I wonder, how much this review (and all the others around) are impacted by the “fear of Apple” factor http://www.osnews.com/story/28423/Fear_of_Apple
I’m always annoyed by two things with my Android phone will driving (I’m sure Apple with have similar).
I use Googlemaps as my go-to Sat Nav – Car has inbuilt Sat Nav but it’s just horrible, interface, routing everything. As LONG as Android phone doesn’t lose network connectivity G maps is great Sat Nav.
If however I dare to look at a notification while stuck in traffic, then the screen lock is reactivated if I forget to go back to maps quickly enough. Unlocking in traffic is dangerous
Smartwatch with double-tap to unlock paired phone would be great. Maybe tripletap or long tap (or whatever) to scroll through most recent notifications would be great too. Interacting with smartphone on the move isn’t safe – and should be a no-no and minimised to say the least.
The big one (for me) – would be audio notes (voice control perhaps too!!?) but particularly just audio notes — transcribed to text if doable perfectly woudl be be a nice bonus. But all thoughs idea one has during hours on the road. The smart watch would be perfect for conduit for these.
Niche – don’t care – thats what I want. Maybe new pebble already does? I heard something along those lines..
That’s a cool use case I’d have never thought of, using the watch to drive your phone so that your phone can then display what it needs when docked where you can see it. You might have actually found a use case for these watches which doesn’t strike me as pointless justification for spending money.