Apple Watch reviewThis past week’s Disrupt NY 2015 conference was my first opportunity to use the Apple Watch at a multi-day event, and considering Disrupt is always essentially a non-stop workfest for us here at TC, from morning well into night, it’d be hard to find a better real-world test case to see how the Apple Watch performs in this type of setting. The apps that come with your Apple Watch run the gamut from super useful to superficial, but no matter what you think of any of them, they’re not going away.As someone who feels the need to check my phone every five minutes, the Sport quickly disrupted long-held daily habits, but I was still left pondering if it was worth the hassle of charging another gadget on a daily basis.When Apple makes a major announcement like a move into the wearables category, it’s guaranteed a long line of other businesses will jump on board any which way they can; aiming for success by association with relevant launches of their own. On your iPhone, you can just make a folder of the un-deletable Apple apps (looking at you, Compass and Tips), so at least they’re out of sight and out of mind.
The crown button scroll wheel combined with the app homescreen is an artfully clever solution for navigating the small real estate of the impressively clear AMOLED watch face, while using the force-sensitive screen feels equally intuitive and will surely feature on future iPhones. Creating a game for a small-screened wearable device is much different than doing the same for a phone or tablet, as developers told us before the launch, but there are some bright ideas amidst the early lineup. My job at the semi-annual event is generally to provide a constant stream of photography from the stage, for use in our steady feed of posts covering what’s happening that go up in some cases while the speaker or speakers are still presenting. Not every game on this list is great, per se—some are more interesting than fun, while others have good ideas but aren’t cohesive or fully compelling. Retail is one of the key categories within that, with Target, Asos, Amazon, JC Penney and Marks & Spencer just some examples of those who introduced new applications specifically.
It’s a task that can tend to result in tunnel vision, since I’m literally spending a huge chunk of my day staring down the tunnel of glass that is the lens attached to my DSLR camera body. Reading text messages and replying via dictation – Apple’s voice recognition technology has come a long way – and even taking calls Dick Tracy-style, soon became second nature. Back at my MacBook, the screen real estate is taken up by a mix of batch image processing tools, file folders and browser windows, meaning work communication apps and things like Twitter take a backstage seat (whereas normally they’re front and centre on one of my external monitors). So much of the Apple Watch’s functionality is dependent on it being tethered to an iPhone 5, or subsequent device via Bluetooth or wi-fi that it’s best to think of it as an accessory rather than a standalone device. But there’s something intriguing about all ten of these games, and if you have an Apple Watch and want to see the first steps into wearable gaming, these are the titles to download.
The update of the DirecTV app for iPhone, which now includes support for Apple Watch, lets users play, pause, rewind and fast-forward recorded content; view program title, channel and episode details of TV shows and movies; set DVR recordings; and navigate the on-screen guide. “We are excited to give our customers an even easier and seamless way to engage with their favorite TV shows and movies,” said Tony Goncalves, DirecTV’s senior VP of digital entertainment products. That’s a good thing in terms of maintaining focus, but it can also mean missing requests from the rest of the team, or dropping a crucial bit of news. But as you add third-party apps, those go to the edges of your app cluster too, so you may find yourself continually pushing unloved apps further out—it’s kind of a pain, to be honest. This brings me to the biggest issue I had during my seven-day test – you regularly have to wait for data to be relayed to the device from third-party apps. Rules! ($3) has probably enjoyed the biggest push of any Watch game from Apple, with an appearance at the last pre-launch event and a free giveaway this month.
Are such efforts merely about benefitting from the media coverage likely to follow, or do they actually think there’s potential to be shopping from our wrists? Apple Watch helps here because it can provide a stream of notifications from those crucial backchannel apps, meaning the team communication can continue without a sacrifice in focus. To help you get everything sorted, we present these short reviews of every single app that shipped with the Apple Watch—and rank them best to worst. Hanging about with your arm extended for the BBC News app to update, or to check arrival times on London Bus Checker, often meant a quicker and smoother experience was had by reaching into my bag or pocket for my phone.
In researching this piece, everyone I either spoke to in passing or formally interviewed, unanimously agreed a screen at 38mm or 42mm is not going to be ideal for browsing e-commerce pages, especially in the apparel space, no matter how optimized they’ve been made. The Watch is the perfect channel for this because it’s not a distraction in the way that a persistent screen is; it provides an awareness that allows you to remain in the loop, without demanding your full attention. Also, omissions such as the lack of onboard GPS for fitness tracking leave you scratching your head, highlighting that this is very much ‘version 1.0’.
Granted, it’s not quite as smart in its smaller form, since the condensed daily challenges you’ll face now use a two-by-two grid (four cards) instead of three-by-three (nine cards). As Lucie Greene, worldwide director at J Walter Thompson Intelligence, says: “It’s been established that even on smartphones, consumers want detail and rich visuals to make purchases on mobile devices and I’m not sure that’s entirely possible yet on a watch.” Sagarika Sundaram, strategist at creative consultancy Wolff Olins, was of the same thought: “The Apple Watch today is not an object that you want to browse on – the screen is too small for you to want to spend too much time looking at your wrist.” Apps, like Uber’s, that do one thing really well, will be the most successful, she said. This is, after all, a new platform and future features – such as integration with Apple’s Homekit automation application and Apple Pay – will certainly see the Watch come into its own.
So when asked to remember multiple waves of sorting rules—in ascending order, certain color cards only, only cards with characters facing right, and so on and so forth—it’s a simpler task. Apple’s interactive notification support in iOS carries over to the Watch, so that developers don’t even need to do anything more to get them working on the wearable.
For retailers she refers to ideas like bookmarking a dress, saving a coupon for later or setting up an alert for a sale as features that will be useful, but also things that ultimately users will come back to on their phones. In practice this means I’m able to do things like archive email in Gmail, which is great for triage, but more importantly, it also lets me provide basic responses on some key platforms.
If your iPhone is in range, you can browse your iPhone’s music library by artist, album, songs, and playlists, either scrolling with your finger or by spinning the Digital Crown. (Just like a clickwheel!) You can keep up to 2GB of music on your Apple Watch’s 8GB of built-in storage. The simple “Like” is incredibly versatile, and can operate as either just a ‘seen and heard’ acknowledgement, or even as an affirmative response to a request for some kind of action. It’s enough to let me effectively communicate with team members in about 80 percent of the cases that I’ll encounter during the course of the event, and with the Watch I’m far, far more likely to see those requests and comments in order to be able to respond to them at all. It’s simple and straightforward, and you can play an entire game within a couple minutes—plus you can look away and stop playing at any point and have the game remain intact for whenever you’re using your Watch again.
When scrolling through product on its app (on the basis you are of course inclined to do so on said small screen), users can save items they’re interested in, then jump over to their phones to see more detail. It’s a narrative adventure in which you’ll correspond with a person whose ship has crash-landed on an alien moon—and his messages are only coming to you.
The understanding there is that you instantly need to see it on your wrist rather than willingly waiting long enough to see it on your phone otherwise. At various points during the day, you’ll get a buzz on your watch and check in, read the latest notes, and choose from branching options that can alter the narrative.
Its 1-click purchase is particularly a seamless one however, and certainly an appealing factor if you know exactly what you’re after and can search for it. Elevate (free) might be listed in the App Store under Education, but Apple’s pick for last year’s best overall iPhone app can’t help but feel like a game above all—especially on the Watch, with rapid-fire daily challenges that task you with solving various math and vocabulary questions within mere moments. The Apple Watch’s communication tools are also extra nice because they’re very personal, which is a big plus when you’re otherwise out of touch with those you’re close to. The wrist-held Dash modes test your ability to quickly suss out the correct percentage of a number for a tap, associate similar words, or choose the actual spelling of a term. Woolworths , a major supermarket chain in Australia, for instance, provides navigation to the user’s nearest store with its app, as well as the exact aisle to find the groceries they’re after.
The key ingredients as I see it would be smarter interactive notifications, and a way to set a specific app as the default wake option on your device. Activity shows you three concentric rings: the large red ring is for Move (a calorie-burn goal based on your general activity level, and easily adjusted with a force touch), a medium green ring for Exercise (30 minutes per day), and a small blue ring for Stand (standing up and moving around for at least one minute per hour, 12 hours out of the day). The watch will prompt you to get up and move around at 50 minutes past each hour, if you didn’t already log at least a minute of activity in the hour so far.
This would let me keep my calendar front and center, for instance, which would be greatly useful for keeping track of what I’m supposed to be doing at any given time during events. I could just as easily do a silly dance for a minute.) Verdict: A Even with its quirks, I’ve found the Activity app much more compelling and motivating than using a Fitbit or a Jawbone UP to track my steps. So the clue might be colors, tennis, or the grocery store, and you’ll have to discover which applicable words you can spell with the provided letters. I’ve used other smartwatches as conference helpers in the past, to great effect – the Pebble is generally my CES pal, even after I stopped using it day-to-day. For Maani Safa, VP of innovation and creative at mobile marketing solutions company Somo, payments are an enormous part of the watch and capability absolutely needs to be integrated across stores.
There’s a compulsive appeal to checking back in to tap on the attack button a few times, but with no storytelling or character building, the moment-to-moment stuff is a little flat. From there the store could communicate with you as you walked past (outside), tell you about discounted products it KNOWS you like, give you spot discounts (inside the store), updates, guidance and more.” Indeed the greatest opportunities for retailers in the long-term, alongside Apple Pay, seem to surround in-store, location-based and personalized notifications, rather than merely e-commerce. BoxPop (free) doesn’t try to translate its full game experience onto the smaller screen, but instead serves up a series of daily puzzles to complete.
As on the larger devices, the goal is simple: Using a knight from chess, who can only move in L-shaped patterns, you must land on every space and clear the board. If I have Messages open on my Mac and it’s the active app (as in, I’m using it to chat with someone), the message will pop up there and leave both my iPhone and Apple Watch dark. It’s not the only Watch game of that sort, but whereas Hatchi is just a companion app, Battle Camp’s wrist gameplay actually lets you interact with the creature as you aim to keep it happy while it grows.
I also love how Apple claims the watch as the most accurate timepiece ever, but still lets you set ahead a few minutes. (Up to 59 minutes, actually.) Because what’s a watch you can’t set ahead a few minutes? You’re not even a hardened pro, but rather the son of the late agency head tasked with carrying on the family business and discovering how dad really died.
You’ll get messages from your field agent throughout the day as you send him out on missions, and you’ll occasionally need to direct him around danger—or straight through it for a potential greater reward. And for Apple Pay, all I had to do was double-tap my watch’s button to pull up my default Apple Pay card, and then hold the face of my watch right over the credit card terminal. It can even launch the camera app on the paired iPhone if it’s not launched already. (It even worked when my iPhone was locked.) The watch app has two buttons, a shutter button to take a shot immediately, or a button with a 3s indicator. It’d be kind of cool if you could force-touch the screen to temporarily pair the app to a different iPhone, or flip the iPhone from the front camera to the back.
But that latter feature is a forgiveable omission, since you’ll be setting up the shot with your iPhone anyway, propping it up on a stand and pointing it where you want. We’ve got a deeper dive into both the Activity and Workout apps, and we’re planning a head-to-head showdown of its heart rate accuracy versus a dedicated chest strap. Verdict: A I like how the Workout app won’t let me cheat—I recently logged 40 minutes on a stationary bike, but slacked off for the first 15 before getting serious for the last 25.
Navigating the Apple TV’s menu is easy with swipes and taps, and the Menu and Play/Pause buttons on the bottom look tiny, but I found them easy to hit. It works pretty well—I even used it in the car without turning the radio all the way down, and my friend and I were able to hear each other pretty well. Verdict: A- Bay Area weather doesn’t vary a whole lot, which makes weather apps less exciting here. (Oh, it’ll be around 60 and mostly sunny pretty much all the time? Verdict: B+ Occasionally, Digital Touch gives me an error message that my drawing can’t send, but otherwise, it’s a pretty fun feature to play with—assuming you have watch-owning pals to use it with.
But I love getting taps on my wrist when it’s time to turn, instead of spoken directions that interrupt whatever music or podcasts I’m listening to. Even reading messages on the watch’s small screen isn’t a great experience, and I’d appreciate more features for triaging the deluge of email I get every day.
Verdict: B- Apple’s insistence on putting your photos on all your devices makes sense, but this app needs a couple of updates before it’s truly great. I wish I could hide these icons from the home screen and either use Siri to launch the apps, or just ask Siri what time it is in another city, and have her set my alarms and timers for me.