What is the Apple Watch doing for its owners?

by philg

In September 2014 I wrote a post asking what the 2015 Apple Watch would do better than the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch from 2013.

The Apple Watch has been out for a while now. Sales are slowing down. What do readers who own the device find most useful about it?

I have an iPhone 6 Plus, which I love for the camera (see below), but I don’t feel any motivation to acquire a watch that requires its own custom charger.

7 thoughts on “What is the Apple Watch doing for its owners?”

  1. It’s a watch that tells you what the temperature is, and makes a noise when you gave a message. You can read short messages without getting the phone out of your pocket. Not much good beyond that. I’m not really bill gates.

  2. My wife loves her Apple Watch more than any other device I’ve seen her use. In particular, she frequently uses:
    • the health- and exercise-related functionality
    • Siri timers
    • Siri reminders
    • Siri directions
    • Siri calendar additions
    • messaging
    • controlling music playback (useful while gardening)

    The custom charger’s a non-issue. It’s plugged in behind the bedside table, she charges each night, and has only once in two months exhausted power in daily use.

  3. * Nice to see incoming calls, texts, other notifications without having to get out phone. Can reject incoming calls from watch.
    * Apply Pay is pretty handy but not accepted everywhere
    * Boarding pass for airline flights on watch, kinda gimmicky maybe
    * Stopwatch handy for flying holds (but I wish it would vibrate once every 60 seconds!)
    * Health and exercise monitoring is nice but I don’t wear the watch to the gym!
    * Local and zulu time in 24 hour format on watch face is handy

  4. I read an SF story of a subcutaneous “tattoo” on a wrist that displayed the time. Where did I read that? Anyway, no watches for me, but I might buy such a tattoo, but it would have to be completely generic technology and offer no way to identify the user. A watch, calendar, maybe supports temporary bluetooth pairs with a phone/tablet/tricorder in nfc reach.

    (In the future, people will not have watches, they will have Life-clock’s embedded in their palm.)

  5. I’ve had my watch for a bit over a month. The biggest shortcoming is the 1.0 software that only allows apps to execute on the phone; the watch is acting only as a remote display (this will change this fall when WatchOS 2.0 launches).

    For the user, this means that third party apps are nearly unusable. Load times of 10+ seconds, even for built-in apps like Stocks, are the norm. I just tried opening the Weather Underground app and it showed a loading screen for 13 seconds. In general it’s much faster to pull the phone out of your pocket.

    Overall, that’s a theme with the watch as a convenience or time saver. If an email comes in and a glance at the subject line is sufficient information, it’s a convenience. However, if you have to go to the phone for more info, it would have been easier to just pull the phone out in the first place. It leads to confusion; I’ve caught myself holding the phone, yet still checking a new alert on the watch with the phone in hand. The same applies for text messages; if a canned response of “OK” is sent, the watch is handy, but it’s pretty worthless if you need to compose a longer reply. Siri dictation works pretty well, but the same problem arises: if Siri doesn’t get the message right (and I’d give her about a 50% success rate), you’re wasting more time than just typing it out on the phone in the first place.

    The fitness monitoring functionality, specifically heart rate, is also crippled by software. I switched from a Basis Peak watch that syncs HR data to a nice web dashboard, and allows for a simple CSV export of data for geeks. The Apple Watch HR data is locked up in Apple Health which has completely useless data visualization, and there is not a single 3rd party app available on the App Store that generates decent plots of the data (not sure if Apple is rejecting such apps due to the expansive goals of Health subjecting it to HIPAA constraints – the ToS for app developers hints at this).

    For pilots, Foreflight has one of the more responsive Watch apps (typically loads in 2-5 s). It shows METARs for nearby/recent/favorite airports, has an in-flight instrument display (ground speed, altitude, track) and a dual timer that’s fairly handy. The stopwatch on the Chronograph watch face is also pretty nice, and very quickly accessible.

    Overall, I would say it’s a decent fashion accessory (if you find a nerdy wrist computer to be fashionable) that’s severely limited by bad software.

  7. I don’t own an Apple Watch but I do have a Samsung smartwatch. After the initial oooh and ahhhs fade away, your pretty much left with a watch where you can check your emails and text messages from. That’s the best part for me. All the other apps are just not worth it though.

    Oh, and you can control your phones music from the watch and make/receive phone calls from it. Pretty 007 if you ask me. : )

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