Work out if Apple Watch ticks enough of your boxes

Despite the glitz of the new Apple Watch, in the end what matters is if and how it changes your life.

Despite the glitz of the new Apple Watch, with all its edition and size variants, bands and buckles, in the end what matters is if and how it changes your life.

I’ve been wearing smartwatches for a year, and have a firm view about how they can positively complement a smartphone.

For the record — my favourite Apple Watch at Friday’s launch of presales was the standard stainless steel model, the smaller 38mm rather than 42mm size (yes, blokes don’t have to wear larger sizes), with the metallic Milanese Loop band. It looks classy and is easy to clasp.

What sets Apple Watch apart is the company’s fastidiousness for a good user experience.

Take Apple’s watch crown, a hi-tech version of the age-old crown on analog watches. Pinching to zoom on a small watch face is fiddly, as is reading an email with your finger hiding the contents as you scroll downward, or entering a number without typing on a tiny keyboard.

On the Apple Watch, you achieve all of this by twiddling the crown dial. It’s Apple design at its best.

And just as well. The apps menu on Apple Watch is tiny — so you might be twiddling the crown to enlarge the icons.

How smartwatches and Apple Watch in particular improve your life is a subjective matter. It depends what you use them for. I can tell you what works for me. Apple Watch comes with a bag of functions, each of which you can adopt or ignore.

When I first started wearing smartwatches, it was the crowdfunded Pebble watch. Its claim to fame was notifications. An alert that appears on a lock screen such as for a new email, SMS, calendar alert through to a software update was relayed to the watch. You get zapped on the wrist by a short ­vibration to notify you.

That’s also the case with Apple Watch and herein is its most useful function — as a screening device. I, like many others, get hundreds of emails daily and, when a watch notifies me to a new alert, I can ignore it or act on it.

But you need to take control of your notifications, otherwise you’ll be bombarded on your watch. By default we’re alerted to things we don’t need to know. Its worthwhile going into phone settings and set alerts on or off for each app.

If I act on an alert, I take the phone from my pocket to call, text or email. The fact I don’t get out my phone to read irrelevant messages saves time.

Also, with the watch piggybacking off a phone, I never miss inward calls because my wrist ­vibrates when they arrive.

Then there’s activity and fitness monitoring — steps, calories burned etc. While there’ll be third-party apps for this soon enough, Apple Watch itself offers basic activity tracking and a separate workout app that records each run, walk or cycling event separately. It includes heart rate monitoring.

However, Apple Watch lacks two fitness features. One is a dedicated GPS, which does save battery. So you’ll need to take your GPS-equipped iPhone on walks and runs if you want mapping and laps incorporated into your ­metrics.

The other is waterproofing. Apple says sweating is not a problem, but if Watch Sport was waterproof it could be used for swimming and triathlon training.

Given its one-day battery life, I wouldn’t count on Apple Watch to monitor sleep even using a third party app, if you plan on routinely charging it overnight.

Being prompted at work to stand up at intervals is an important benefit that Apple Watch ­offers.

I also listen to music played directly from the watch while exercising — without having the phone nearby. I’ve enjoyed this lightweighted feeling for some months wearing the Sony SWR50 and LG GWatch R smartwatches, and it’s great to see it on Apple Watch. I use lightweight Bluetooth headphones.

Making payments directly by swiping Apple Watch is another clear benefit, although this isn’t implemented in Australia. But given Apple Passport is on your watch, there is potential for swiping a terminal with Apple Watch when presenting a retail loyalty card, a flight boarding pass, or other barcoded cards.

Other clearly useful things include finding your phone from the watch, setting a timer, stopwatch or wake-up alarm that buzzes your wrist without waking your partner.

If you approach Apple Watch as a device with a 1001 functions that you need to master, then you might hate it. If you take things slowly, find four or five features that improve your life, then you’ll enjoy using it. There’s plenty of time to get across the rest.

I don’t see myself sharing my heart beat with anyone excluding a heart specialist, or sending emoticon responses. And I’m not a fan of voice dictation from the watch unless it offers bulletproof accuracy. But that’s me. It’s what matters to you that will count.