The Apple Watch after 10 months
User Experience and UI
At the beginning of last year I wrote a brief review of the Xiaomi Mi Band 3, shortly after I bought an Apple Watch Series 4.
The post will cover mostly User Experience and User Interface aspects without getting too much into hardware specs and overall technology since that has already been extensively covered.
Input and feedback
The watch can be directly interacted with in two ways: through the touchscreen and with what Apple calls “Digital Crown” (there’s also one side button but you won’t be using it as much).
The screen — same as with any phone today — supports multi-touch inputs and the usual gestures like drag, pinch, and swipe.
It is also equipped with what Apple calls “Force Touch” allowing you to access hidden menus on some applications by pressing a little harder on the screen.
After interacting with the watch at any given point covering the display with your palm makes the screen sleep immediately.
The Digital Crown resembles the crown found in any analog watch, usually used to wind and set the time. In the Apple Watch, it allows different interactions depending on the app you are running, but basically there’re 2 things you can do: click and scroll.
“Click” toggles between the home screen and the watch face, or exit any running app, press and hold accesses Siri, and double click toggles between the last 2 app run.
“Scroll” allows you to navigate different menus, zoom in and out, adjust the volume and a few other things.
While using the scroll, Haptic feedback in the wrist feels very natural and responsive. It immediately reminded me of the subtle and satisfying “tick” sound on old iPods while navigating menus with the wheel. This is where Apple stands out the most, seamlessly integrating software and hardware.
Haptic feedback (and sound if turned on), is also used to notify you of different things such as a reminder to breathe (yes), stand up, activity completion, an email/text, or on every whole hour. The expressiveness and levels of feedback the watch is able to generate are impressive, this allows you to be aware of the things that are important to you without requiring you to watch the watch :P.
The “click” on the Crown, on the other hand, feels stiff and often requires the use of an opposing finger to apply enough pressure although this seems to be by design so the button is not accidentally pressed, but I think it could have been avoided altogether by a combination of software and hardware, e.g.: only recognizing press when the finger is in direct contact with the surface of the Crown, which is capacitive.
Notifications
Notifications play a huge role in the Apple Watch. Every notification you get on your phone will now be shown on your wrist instead, but the way you interact with them is different.
One thing you’ll hear about owning an Apple Watch is “I don’t take out my phone as much”. Ironically adding a new screen to your wrist could decrease technology addiction.
A notification on your phone draws your attention to the task and makes you interact at that moment in the corresponding application. It wouldn’t be hard to assume that by this point you are already engaged with one or multiple applications and distracted with what you were doing.
Notifications on your watch work differently, you can decide to take immediate action or ignore them.
The moment you receive a new notification you will feel a subtle tap on your wrist. Raise your arm and the watch face will light up to get a quick glance at it. Ignore it and it will go away to the notification center of the watch.
If you decide to do the first, depending on the notification you will be able to interact with it right there: accept a call, reply to a message with smart replies, complete that activity and so on.
Every interaction with the watch is fast, lasts just a few seconds (5 or 10 seconds at most). This is very important, just imagine having to raise your arm to look at the screen and in mid-air interact with your other arm on a small screen that requires you the precision of your index finger, would result in fatigue very shortly (this is, in my opinion, the main reason why Apple doesn’t ship laptops with touchscreens, it is uncomfortable to use them in that position, feels unnatural and your body will get injured over repetition).
Applications
Like your iPhone, your watch is also capable of running different applications, native and from 3rd party developers. Most applications are simple enough so that you are able to use them from your wrist, while others can become much more complex to the point where it ends up being easier to take out the phone (e.g.: composing an email).
App Store
By the time I started this review with WatchOS 5, my initial thoughts were that the App Store looked left behind.
There were some applications that were available for the watch but removed afterwards for some reason, like Twitter, eBay, Amazon, Instagram, Slack, and Google Maps to name a few.
The fact that major brands lost interest in having their apps available for the Apple Watch raises some concerns.
It’s not clear whether the removal of these apps was due to the lack of user’s interest in them, they didn’t add much value or the watch is just not a good fit for some tasks.
On top of this — at that time — to install an app on the watch, it was required to download the iPhone app first, which in most cases was not of my interest. That made the commitment to try apps much higher.
This has been solved and in WatchOS 6 there’s a dedicated Store to download apps just for the watch, making it almost autonomous from the phone.
You’ll notice that today most apps in the Store are health-related, that is where the Apple Watch finally found its niche.
Music App
The Apple Watch has a total of 8 GB of storage on it, with about 5.6 GB of usable space for apps, music, and photos. The Music Application has a nice easy to use interface displaying albums on the watch. This can be useful in case you want to go for a run or start a workout without taking your phone (and you don’t have the cellular version).
This reminded me of better days where I would own my music on my iPod.
ECG (electrocardiogram)
By the time of writing, the most acclaimed feature added to the watch: ECG capability, is unfortunately unavailable in my country, so I wasn’t able to review it.
Activity & Workouts
The Activity app is by far the most used app in the Watch (other than watch faces of course). It can track your activity in 3 categories: Move, Exercise and Stand (oh yes the rings).
I started using the watch regularly as a companion for my workouts (Workouts app) and to track my progress at the same time (Activity app), and that is definitely where the watch proved to be more useful to me. I don’t believe it would have been useful otherwise.
When you start a workout manually you can choose the type (from a list of 90+) and based on that and the duration it calculates the calories burnt.
In case you forgot to start the workout manually, the watch will automatically detect movement and ask to track it. In the same way, if you stop moving for a few minutes, it will ask you if you are done working out and stop it for you.
Watch faces
The Apple Watch allows almost an infinite number of customizations, from watch bands to the numerous combinations it allows in its watch “face” (where you read the time) and its complications (refers to any feature in a mechanical timepiece beyond the simple display of hours, minutes and seconds — Wikipedia).
With every update, Apple also introduces new watch face designs and releases seasonal bands that match the colors you can choose for the different faces.
Creating/editing a Watch face on the watch can sometimes be tedious especially for some customizations where there are so many options, like colors (over 60 colors in my last count).
But there are some advantages as opposed to creating them from your phone, for example, customizing complications can be confusing because instead of selecting which complication you want to edit, you have to pick it from a list (there can be up to 8 complications) where they are just named: “Top Left”, “Bottom Right”, “Sub-dial Bottom”, “Sub-dial Right” and so on. This could be easily redesigned so that at least you know which one you are editing.
The Face Gallery, on the other hand, is much easier to navigate while comparing the different alternatives.
Phone calls and text messages
Making and receiving phone calls on your watch works surprisingly well, so much that the person on the other side will never suspect it.
Replying to text messages is trickier though. There are basically 3 ways to do this: Default Replies (customizable from the iPhone), Dictated Messages (audio or transcript), and the most complex one: scribble messages (letter by letter). If you are using the Apple Messages app you can also reply with little drawings (how nice).
This works pretty well if you are using the Apple Messages app, and with only 1 language, but in many countries outside the US (including mine), the most popular app for messaging is WhatsApp, and using more than one language is a challenge.
You’ll notice that images from WhatsApp are blurry (making you rush to the phone to see the actual image). And changing the language to reply to a message takes a lot of steps (and it doesn’t remember the last selection, or is smart about it), although this is not exclusive to WhatsApp but to every app where you can Reply.
Siri
Siri is surprisingly good, and it gets better over time, you can do almost everything by just raising the wrist and asking.
This makes it trustworthy and over time some tasks that you would normally do on your phone or with the UI of the watch can now be completely relied on to Siri.
Some examples of this includes: starting a timer, making calculations, calling someone or asking random questions that can be found on the web.
Conclusions and final thoughts
The Apple Watch is a solid device that became really good in its last software update (watchOS 6) and is expected to get even better in the years to come with more health indicators, better battery performance, improved screen, form factor, and functionality.
Apple finally found its niche turning the watch into a health and fitness tracker and will be competing directly with existing devices like Garmin or FitBit (recently acquired by Google).
Surviving applications in the App Store are mostly health-related and we will have to see whether there’s a different approach to make the watch useful for different tasks.
The level and amount of possible customizations are great now, unfortunately, watch faces are still closed to 3rd party developers, so — for the time being — we’ll have to rely on Apple’s updates for this.
With the Apple watch, I experienced a drop in my daily phone usage, being able to rely on the watch for many tasks (thanks in part to an improved Siri), and also maintained a sustained workout routine with the help of Apple’s tireless encouragement.
I truly felt I didn’t need to have my phone with me constantly and that I could leave freely without worrying about missing something important. Now I can only wonder: Will the SmartWatch replace the SmartPhone someday?
