How To
Don’t delay in making your smartwatch as useful as possible
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Wearable Technology
It’s Christmas morning and you’ve been a very good person this year, so Santa has left a brand new Apple Watch Series 2 for you under the tree.
Once you’ve unwrapped it, charged it and paired it to your smartphone, you’d be forgiven for spending a couple of hours just stroking the screen and twiddling the digital crown – it is an essential part of receiving a new toy, after all.
After that’s done it’s time to customise your Apple Watch and make it useful. Here are the first six things you should do.
1. Pick A Watch Face
The recent watchOS 3 update brought a host of new faces to the Apple Watch, making it easier than ever to get the exact information you want at a glance.
For fitness fiends, this will mean putting your activity rings front and centre (pictured). For obsessive planners, pick a face where you can see your upcoming appointments.
You can pick and sort your faces from the app or with a force touch on the Apple Watch itself. You can even set a few favourites and swap between them quickly by sliding a finger over the face.
2. Install Your Favourite Fitness App
Due to its inbuilt GPS and waterproof body, the Apple Watch works is the best smartwatch for fitness purposes, and works in perfect harmony with all of the most popular smartphone fitness apps. Strava, Nike+ Run Club, Runtastic and many, many more all have dedicated Apple Watch apps so you can transition from phone to watch easily.
RECOMMENDED: The Best Apple Watch Fitness Apps
3. Sort Your Dock
Another change brought to the Apple Watch by watchOS 3 is the dock, which is accessed by clicking the side button. This contains up to ten of your most commonly used apps which are kept in a state of constant readiness so they load quickly. To remove an app, swipe up on it in the dock and hit the big cross.
4. Go App Hunting
Beyond fitness, there are innumerable apps to customise your watch with and make your life easier. Want to know when it’s going to rain – TO THE EXACT MINUTE? Then install Dark Sky. If you’re keen on staying up to date, BBC News is there for you, and Londoners need never be lost again if they install Citymapper. The list of handy Apple Watch apps is almost endless, so it’s definitely worth committing some time to grabbing the most useful ones for you.
5. Choose Your Complications
Some apps are special on the Apple Watch, so special they get special privileges – namely that you can add a complication to the watch face that links directly to the app.
This is the best way to navigate around your favourite apps and get info at a glance. For example you can have a timer ticking away in one corner of the watch face, a translator in the middle (iTranslate) and the weather in another corner.
5. Start Chatting To Siri
Siri is more useful presence on the Apple Watch than the phone for many reasons, the most important of which is that when talking to the watch you can pretend you’re in Star Trek.
Other than that, simply saying “Hey Siri” brings up the virtual assistant, and from there you can do all kinds of things without having to actually touch anything – check football scores, set timers, calendar events and reminders, call people – the list goes on. Just remember to start each conversation with the correct stardate.
Nick Harris-Fry
Fitness
Fitness Technology
Wearable Technology
Gear
25 Dec 2016