Apple Watch Review – A Day in the Life
theverge.com
theverge.com
> Let’s just get this out of the way: the Apple Watch, as I reviewed it for the past week and a half, is kind of slow. There’s no getting around it, no way to talk about all of its interface ideas and obvious potential and hints of genius without noting that sometimes it stutters loading notifications. Sometimes pulling location information and data from your iPhone over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi takes a long time. Sometimes apps take forever to load, and sometimes third-party apps never really load at all. Sometimes it’s just unresponsive for a few seconds while it thinks and then it comes back.
Data transfer between the phone and watch should be something that feels as seamless as magic...else, what's the point of getting the watch?
I wonder when Apple plans to add native support to the WatchKit SDK -- in a few months? A year? Or maybe they'll just wait for the second generation.
That's the case with everything the watch can do, I believe. I know it can only receive notifications from iOS devices, and I'm pretty sure that, similar the original iPhone, it won't even tell the time without first pairing to an iPhone. (The original iPhone wouldn't do anything without first being connected to iTunes).
Both the iPhone and the iPad became dramatically thinner and faster within two or three generations. They're dealing with tighter constraints here, but I fully expect a similar trajectory. The watch is going to look enormous and slow in a year or two.
Squabbling over 16 vs 18 vs 20 hours doesn't matter.
It's 15-20% of what the Pebble gets.
In my book, that adds up to extremely short.
For what it is, the Apple watch has a much longer battery life than most people expected. Calling it 'extremely short'is misrepresentative.
An electric flying car with a two mile range may have drastically different functionality than an old diesel hatchback with a 15 gallon tank, but that doesn't mean that the electric flying car has sufficient range to meet the needs of more people.
See? I can do hyperbole, too.
>For what it is, the Apple watch has a much longer battery life than most people expected.
The fact that expectations were low doesn't change the fact that the battery life is still very limited.
I think smartwatches have potential to be highly useful devices. I think that usefulness is also significantly curtailed by current battery life. The fact that the Apple Watch can't be relied on to remain useful for even a single 24 hour day would lead me to call the battery life extremely short regardless of other wearables are doing. The fact that it's being outpaced by those other options just exacerbates it.
The fact is that battery life that satisfies the needs of the vast majority of users cannot reasonably be called 'extremely short'.
The Apple watch can clearly be relied on to remain useful for a single 24 hour day. Your statement to the contrary is flatly false, and is contradicted by both Apple's testing and reviewers experience.
I am not convinced at all that not supporting sleep tracking is a valid reason for wanting longer battery life for the Apple watch. It has to be charged at some point, so what happens then?
Sleep tracking is certainly valuable, but why is the watch the right hardware for that? Many people don't like wearing watches in bed, and sleep tracking can be done with much simpler hardware than the Apple Watch. Why not do it using a $30 headless sensor instead?
Apple themselves only rate the watch for 18 hours. So you're contending that Apple is intentionally listing a battery 50% lower than what the device can actually do?
....or it can't be relied to remain useful for a continuous 24 hour period.
So where's the flatly false statement here?
>Sleep tracking is certainly valuable, but why is the watch the right hardware for that? Many people don't like wearing watches in bed, and sleep tracking can be done with much simpler hardware than the Apple Watch. Why not do it using a $30 headless sensor instead?
Sleep tracking is just a single, obvious use where it makes a difference now.
What I'm contending is that wearables that require the use to actively think about battery life aren't going to live up to the potential of the devices as a class.
I went absurd with the flying car thing because I feel like you're being kind of ridiculous here, but electric cars actually do highlight exactly what I'm talking about. Electric cars didn't become viable for the vast majority of people until ranges got to the point that they could easily exceed the distances people travel on a regular basis.
And because you still don't seem to understand what I mean by "extremely short" and want to keep harping on it - if the rumor mill thought an electric car was going to launch with a 5 mile range and it launched with a 10 mile range, it might be exceeding expectations, but I'd still call that "extremely short" and feel it worthy of criticism. It may be better than what people were expecting and it may even do things its competitors don't, but it's still a fundamental problem.
I will say this again: I'm interested in wearables, I think they have a ton of potential, and I think you're insane if you don't think 18 hours of battery life drastically limits their realistic utility.
> The fact that the Apple Watch can't be relied on to remain useful for even a single 24 hour day...
This statement is false. Apple's 18 hour battery claim clearly supports that, because the vast majority of humans sleep for 6 hours or more.
In your reply you added the word 'continuous' to your earlier statement to create: "...or it can't be relied on to remain useful for a continuous 24 hour period."
That's not what you originally stated, and it's irrelevant anyway because humans don't need 24 hours of continuous use from devices.
Charging a device every night while you sleep requires you to actively think about battery life less than a device that only needs to be on some nights because for those devices you have to think about whether to charge them or not. Of course you can always mitigate this by charging every night.
Therefore, if not having to think about battery life is an important criterion, the Apple watch does live up to the potential of the devices as a class every bit as much as a device with longer battery life.
Of course a device with longer battery life does have advantages - e.g. Going camping away from power for a few days, etc. but this just illustrates the point that longer battery life supports less common use cases, and is without question not a 'fundamental problem'.
Lack of support for uncommon use cases cannot be reasonably said to 'drastically limit realistic utility'.
Like I said, I agree that longer battery life provides an improvement, but it is a marginal one.
Claims like 'extremely short' and 'drastically limited' are exaggerations.
>Therefore, if not having to think about battery life is an important criterion, the Apple watch does live up to the potential of the devices as a class every bit as much as a device with longer battery life.
Okay, I concede. You win the mental olympics gymnastics competition.
Honestly, they might.
But I'd urge caution. If you drop down $350 on the "basic" version of this thing, then you're paying for what is on offer right now today. You cannot then complain if Apple didn't substantially improve the experience over the next year (rather than just releasing 2.0 and leaving 1.0 people $350 poorer with a device which they can barely even resell).
All I am saying is, if you're happy with the Apple Watch as it exists on the day you buy it then you have nothing to lose. If you know you're going to be unhappy with it and will sit around waiting for Apple to fix it, then maybe instead just wait and buy it when it is actually good (or 2.0, whichever comes first).
I find it incredibly distracting, personally.
What does it really add, other than slowing down your scrolling (my laptop: i7, discrete gfx) and briefly distracting you while you focused on the text.
really? No authentication at all?