I Watched and You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next (Not Really)
My second generation Pebble still hasn’t arrived yet … The compare and contrast post I was hoping for remains unwritten as of yet.
I CAN talk about two weeks with the Watch. I’ve worn it daily in my usual “If I can’t blunder through it, I won’t do that thing” fashion. Because I am lazy. I have a few things I love and have come across a few annoyances.
Battery life hasn’t been a problem, by the way. Usually when I put it on the charger at the end of the day it’s at 50% or so. I suppose you couldn’t wear the watch to bed, but I’m not sure wearing a watch to bed is all that common. I don’t know. But if this is something you need or want to do, you wouldn’t be able to do that unless you committed to charging it some other time.
Are we a thing now?
Five Things I Love About The Apple Watch So Far
1. It’s a beautiful device. Keep in mind I’ve been wearing the larger 1st gen Pebble for over a year. I just don’t have a problem with the size. It feels substantial but not heavy on my wrist. I love the animated faces that move. Jellyfish. Very striking.
2. The haptic reminders/notifications are awesome. No, it’s NOT a shock. It’s just a little tap. I sit a lot so the reminders that I should stand up are great.
3. The Activity Monitor is pretty nice. (See below). I like it. I thought I wouldn’t but I do. It tracks time moving, exercising, time standing up and gives me little haptic high fives. I’m awesome!!!
4. Color. I love the color. Yes, this is something of a subcategory of the first one, but I think it deserves a call-out. Every time I move my wrist to check the time it’s elegant to look at. Sometimes I wish the watch would do more just so I could look at it.
5. Moving/sharing phone functions off the phone. This one applies to any smart watch. I do find it convenient to have notifications on the watch. The phone can stay in the pocket or wherever I have it stashed. I would even say this is the truly transformative functionality.
Ramping down
Four Things That Annoy Me About The Apple Watch So Far
These could well be user error. In fact, they probably are. But really.
1. You can swipe the screen to get to other apps/features–which I like. But the calendar app has me utterly befuddled. To the point where I dread it coming up. Because once it’s on the screen, I get stuck there. I can move through the calendar in a way that would be pretty neat and slick if I wasn’t stuck in the app The only solution I’ve found is to press the button that returns me to home. This means I can never swipe past the Calendar. HELLO! YOU ARE IN THE CALENDAR DON’TLEAVEMEEVER!!!!!
2. I can’t make the voice thing work. Remember, I don’t read instructions unless I have to. I feel stupid talking to the watch and NOTHING HAPPENS. Why? I don’t know and so far I’ve been too lazy even to Google.
3. Sometimes the notifications are delayed. I have two-factor authentication set up for a lot of applications. This means I get a text with a code that is required to complete a login. A few times I’ve pulled out the phone to look at the text and login in and THEN finally, the notification arrives.
4. Activity monitor seems slightly less sensitive than the Pebble. My Pebble app registers the entire hour of my morning work out. The most the Watch has registered is 48 minutes. Usually it’s between 30-40 minutes. Maybe it thinks I’m not sweating enough. It’s related, I’m pretty sure, to what I’m doing with my arm on the treadmill. As long as my arm is moving (as opposed to resting on the bar, or holding something) it seems fine. But on a treadmill it’s my legs that are moving and I keep a pretty steady 3.7 to 4.0 mph for an hour. I feel I’m being cheated of haptic accolades.
I will spend some time Googling and resolve my user error issues and report back.
You’re lucky your Pebble Time hasn’t arrived yet :)
I was one of the first backers, and I live in Ireland (where they shipped some of them from), so I literally got mine before they sent out notifications that they have shipped. And at the time there was no iPhone Pebble Time app, because Apple didn’t yet approve its inclusion to the app store :)
So I had to wait about two days for that. Now that the app has been published though, I find that it doesn’t work as flawlessly as the previous version did (sometime the device gets unpaired for no good reason), so I am hoping they’ll publish an update for it in the near future that would prevent this from happening. The notifications to the Pebble also take a fraction longer to arrive than in the old one’s case, but I don’t think this can be fixed by a simple software update.
The bottom line is that I LOVED my old Pebble (which is why I bought the new one so fast), but so far the Pebble Time is just a meh experience throughout. Maybe it will get better in time, via firmware/app updates (fingers crossed). I am quite curious to see what your review will be. Personally I don’t like the Apple Watch (mostly for being locked in one ecosystem and because of its appalling autonomy), but the frustration I had with my new Time almost made me want to get an AW, so that way at least I could be sure it’ll pair properly all the time.
@Kay:
The Pebble Time arrived Thursday evening…. dun dun dun….
I did google a few things about the Watch and have now successfully sent annoying texts to the progeny via voice. SCORE! I think I figured out the calendar thing.
I have given the Pebble Time to a family member to test as she does not have a smart watch at all. There were …. some issues. The original Pebble was a breeze to set up and use, and there was trouble setting up the new one. Some of that may have been user error as the family member is not at all techy. In fact, I had to delete the Pebble Time app from said person’s phone and start over– this should NEVER be the solution. The app was stuck because there was a blue tooth setting that needed to be changed.
So, preliminarily, I think the Pebble Time app is buggy. However it’s a nice looking device and I’ll have more about it later.
@IAMJSON:
I’m a techie and I had trouble setting it up (including having to remove the app from the phone and start over). Enough said :)
It does look better than the previous, but that’s the only improvement as far as I can tell (I had it for a few weeks now).
Looking forward to your side by side comparison article!
Since your last post, I have broken down and bought the Apple Watch. And I wonder why I dithered on it for so long. I absolutely love it. I agree with all of your love points about it. I’m also finding that having notifications sent to my watch further helped me narrow down what’s important to me. For example, I started out with having Facebook notifications pushed, but I’ve just disabled that.
The less-sensitive Activity Monitor has been a boon for me. I tend to go off overall activity than the amount of exercise minutes. But I am a rocker. I love my recliner and am frequently rocking in it while I type or read a book. On my Fitbit, it created some super-inflated numbers because it registered each rock of the recliner as a step. I’d have to take it off before I sat in the recliner. I tested rocking vigorously with the Apple Watch, and the step count did not budge.
Another boon is directions. I love being able to drive and just respond to the haptic buzz as turn directions come up or flick my wrist and see which way I’m going to turn. I love not having Siri constantly going over my speakers as a result, nor do I need to look away from the traffic at my phone. I feel like I’m driving a lot safer this way. It wouldn’t be good for super long trips because of the battery drain, but local trips are brilliant.
@Meg: There’s a lot to live about some of the things that are convenient about having that interactivity move off the phone and onto the watch!