Apple Watch: How is it to actually live with?

THE Apple Watch is the single most important thing Apple has launched since the iPad.

Apple Watch

THE Apple Watch is the single most important thing Apple has launched since the iPad. It’s the first new product category they have entered since then, and the first brand new product that has been launched since Steve Jobs passed away.

Like tablets when the iPad was released, there have been smartwatches before the Apple Watch, but Apple thinks that like the tablets and smartphones before, they’ve been done wrong and that they can fix it.

The Apple Watch is also the first device that strays Apple away from being a technology brand and now into a fashion label. When Tim Cook first announced the Apple Watch, it was on the cover of the next issue of Vogue magazine, a trend that has continued, with Apple marketing the Watch as a stylish timepiece over a piece of cutting edge technology.

But this is a new piece of cutting edge technology.

There’s never been as much hype around a product that no one really knows what its use is. This is a day in the life of the Apple Watch.

Even I still don’t know what it’s for despite having used it for a while now. The idea of the Apple Watch is to stop me from using my iPhone, which in some case it does, while in others it just makes me more aware that my iPhone is there.

In the morning, I chuck the Apple Watch on and it lets me know the day I have ahead, including my calendar, the weather and how long it I have until I need to leave for the bus. I also have a drawing of male genitalia that a charming colleague of mine drew me over night.

As I’m getting dressed, I get a text message that I reply to using my voice. You feel like a tool doing it in public, but in my room it saved me from needing to get my phone out.

Despite saving time there, I’m still running late and will need to get a cab. Two taps on my wrist and I have an Uber ordered and on seven minutes away. Seven minutes later, my Watch lets me know it’s out the front.

Throughout the day, my wrist constantly buzzes letting me know all sorts of things, whether that be text messages, phone calls, mentions on Twitter or a new Snapchat. It seriously sends you everything. Unless an app is designed for the Apple Watch too, you can’t filter what notifications get sent to your Watch, you simply just get everything. It can be really annoying for things like Facebook Messenger, when you have some group chats that send messages that aren’t that important that you wouldn’t mind seeing on your phone, but don’t need buzzing every five minutes on your wrist.

It can also be annoying that you can’t action upon certain things, the Watch simply just makes you aware that you have been contacted, you still have to bring your phone out to respond. Right now that’s a bit of a problem, especially in social situations. When you constantly have these notifications buzzing to your wrist that you can’t really filter, and some you can’t action with, it leaves you in this awkward stage of being aware that you’re ignoring the person trying to contact you, but also aware that you’re ignoring the person you’re with.

But the Apple Watch does show more glimpses of its value, mainly through supporting third party apps. I had a flight that night, and through Qantas’ app, it constantly updated to see if the flight was delayed, showed me my gate and acted as a boarding pass. Before that though, I need to get a few things from Woolies to have in the fridge when I got back. While I didn’t need much, I wanted to try the Woolworths app. I could add all my items in on my phone and pick my store I was going to. Once there, my wrist ordered my list of things I needed to buy in order of which aisle they’re in at the store. It was genuinely useful and way better than using my phone.

As I drove home, I played my music through my car, and because it’s a few years old now it doesn’t support bluetooth controls to change the track. I could however change the track if I didn’t like it with a quick tap on my Watch. There was always little things like that which popped up and briefly showed me why smartwatches could have a use in our life.

Before I left to the airport, my house mate and I were chatting and trying to convert 130 miles per hour into kilometres. Hold in the digital crown and Siri pops up, I ask her: “What is 130 miles per hour in kilometres?”

Within seconds she has an answer: “130 miles converts to about 209 kilometres per hour”. How crazy is it that you can have a computer on your wrist that can give you the answer to just about anything?

For my final use of the Apple Watch that day, I use it as a boarding pass... except Qantas’ scanner doesn’t have a big enough gap to fit my wrist. Talk about feeling like an idiot.

I like the Apple Watch, I do. But it’s a product that doesn’t quite feel ready. Everything it does shows so much promise and is genuinely useful. But it doesn’t offer anything that you can’t do on your iPhone, it just makes you more aware that you’re not paying attention to people you’re with by worrying that you’re not responding to people that you’re not. It will get better though, once the battery life is improved and Apple and app developers tap into the categories full potential we will have something truly brilliant. But for right now, it’s something that is more a want than a need.