“Why would anyone want a smartwatch, if all it does is duplicate information that’s on your phone?” David Pogue writes for Yahoo Tech. “The Apple Watch makes clear that at least one company has put a good deal of thought into this matter… The average person pulls out his phone 100 times a day. This watch, like all smartwatches, serves as a gatekeeper, a filter. You can glance at your wrist, discreetly and briefly, to see why your phone is trying to get your attention. When you’re in a meeting or in transit, a lot of communiqués aren’t so urgent that you have to deal with them now. With a smartwatch, you can take a peek before committing to hauling out your phone.”
“When the Watch is in a known WiFi hot spot, the watch can perform the most essential online functions even when your phone is completely dead, turned off, or absent. It can query Siri, for example, send and receive texts, and send/receive drawings and tap patterns to other Watch owners. That’s impressive,” Pogue writes. “As you drive, your watch is a tiny GPS screen. (The Watch doesn’t have GPS of its own, but your phone does.) When it’s time to make a turn, the watch taps you twice on the wrist and displays a big arrow. It’s fantastic.”
“The Apple Watch is light-years better than any of the feeble, clunky efforts that have come before it. The screen is nicer, the software is refined and bug-free, the body is real jewelry,” Pogue writes. “First-time technologies await at every turn: Magnetic bands, push-to-release straps, wrist-to-wrist drawings or Morse codes, force pressing, credit-card payments from the wrist. And the symbiosis with the iPhone is graceful, out of your way, and intelligent.”
Tons more, with many screenshots, in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is a very comprehensive review – recommended for prospective Apple Watch buyers.
Related articles:
New York Times’ Manjoo reviews Apple Watch: ‘A power you can’t live without’ – April 8, 2015
Bloomberg’s Topolsky reviews Apple Watch: ‘The world’s best smartwatch’ – April 8, 2015
USA Today’s Baig reviews Apple Watch: ‘Second to none; I want one’ – April 8, 2015
Early reviews are looking pretty darn good!
mm hmm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/08/us-apple-watch-reviews-idUSKBN0MZ1FU20150408
Within a month people who use Apple Watch will be using a word I don’t see much; ‘indispensable.’
But will David Pogue do another product intro video on the Apple Watch like he did with Apple’s iPhone… Good stuff IMO.
Hint Mr. Pogue, use the Rolling Stones “Time Is On My Side” to parody.
“The Apple Watch is light-years better…”
Wow! Didn’t see that coming! 😉
A typically excellent David Pogue review. I learned quite a few things I did not previously know… or think about.
Important that people read the whole article. Pogue indeed delivers a comprehensive review.
It is not all gushing, which shows that Pogue still has a fair and objective approach. I think he’s right to condemn Apple’s overpriced bands: “What was Apple thinking with these breath-catchingly high prices?”
Then there’s an entire section entitled “And now the bad news”. Lots of stuff in there that Apple really needs to address in order to improve the value to the user.
Pogue points out the problem with Apple’s current horrid Ive interface & iconography: “How on earth are you supposed to know what those microscopic icons are? There are no labels, and the icons themselves are about the size of carbon molecules.” Seems Apple hasn’t learned from its iOS7 mess, which continues to be unattractive and unintuitive in many ways.
Bottom line, Pogue identifies correctly that the Apple Watch is a luxury, definitely not a necessity. Despite MDN’s endorsement of the review, the many fanboys on this forum will be angry at Pogue if they read the full article. Because the Apple Watch will not live up to the hype. It is NOT going to appeal to all iPhone users, let alone displace watches from the wrists of the average person on the street, certainly not at the price Apple is asking.
lol, i read through the whole review and it was very positive. I’m sure it was really hard for you to pick up the couple of lines of criticism in that gushing positive review.
What is your point, Dave?
MDN cherry-picks only the positive, following its only motus operandi.
What the MDN take did not bother to mention is that a professional like Pogue does a proper review that includes ALL aspects of a product, good and bad. That is valuable information for a prospective buyer to read, much more important than much of the over-hyped adulation that fanboys heap on this site.
I’m not criticizing Pogues review but your take on it. Pogue was 90% positive but you pick on the few things he was negative to give an impression that Pogue had a lot of misgivings .
MDN has already covered all the promising aspects of the Apple Watch ad nauseum, it is instructive to learn a product’s limitations.
Pogue had valid criticisms, not just superficial tripe and superficial opinionation that passes for journalism these days. If all you want to read is that Apple is perfect and can do no wrong, then don’t bother to read Pogue reviews, or mine. There are plenty of Apple fanboys here who will declare anything from Cupertino to be the mark of perfection, no matter what.