“My Apple Watch came Friday,” Jason Snell writes for Six Colors. “I spent two and half days with the Apple Watch without writing a word about it. I was talking to my mother on the phone today, and she asked what I thought of it—and I told her I couldn’t really say. It’s complicated.”
“This is a new product. Like, a really new product. It’s not like any product I’ve used before, though it has echoes of my old Pebble and of iOS devices, of course,” Snell writes. “But my built-up skills in using iOS were no use to me when I started using the Apple Watch. This is not a tiny iPhone on my wrist. This is something new.”
“It might be good. It’s certainly impressive. But it’s new, and it’s going to take some time to figure out quite what it all means,” Snell writes. “So, in the absence of that sort of revelation, what am I to write about? Let’s take my rapid-fire observations and present them in a hail of bullets…”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The Apple Watch’s learning curve is a bit steep, but after 2+ days with it, experienced iPhone users (people who’ve used Settings, downloaded apps, paired to their vehicles, etc.) will be pretty comfortable with it.
Early on, we found that we kept forgetting to firmly press (Force Touch) the Watch’s face while in apps to access options and additional functionality. You do quickly learn, though, that the gestures of swiping down from the top of the screen while on the Watch face for Notifications and swiping up from the bottom of the screen while on the Watch face for Glances, are going to be important things.
Also, besides just showing Friends (that you set up in your Apple Watch app on your iPhone – an Apple Watch user’s most important iPhone app) the side button next to the Digital Crown also is what you double-click for Apple Pay and also provides access to a number of app quitting, watch restarting, resetting and other important operations.
And, yes, battery life is simply not an issue. The first two nights, after heavy use from the first weekend (including tracking long runs while playing music from the Watch’s onboard storage), the Watch was placed on the charger the first night with 36% and the second night with 44% charge remaining. Apple Watch battery life is a non-issue.