When you press the Digital Crown to access the Apple Watch homescreen, you’ll see small round icons
representing the various apps on offer. On first seeing this I expected to experience problems hitting the right icons, but the touch targets are well optimised: in several weeks of use, I didn’t hit a single wrong button. On a 38mm screen, that’s impressive.
BELOWSensors on the rear of the Watch monitor your heartbeat the Apple Watch, complications are
widgets showing information such as the weather, calendar events, a stopwatch or the phase of the moon. You can choose which of these to show in any of the available “slots” on your chosen watch face.
ABOVEConfiguration options are accessed on your iPhone via the Apple Watch companion app
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The built-in apps themselves are something of a mixed bag. They can access your personal data and settings from the iPhone, but what they actually do with them tends to be quite basic. For example, you can view your favourite images in the Photos app, but you can’t edit or share them. Similarly, the email app is read-only. Weather delivers much the same information you receive on an iPhone, merely tailored to the smaller screen.
The Messages app is a better demonstration of the Watch’s potential: it’s capable of using Siri for dictation, allowing you to initiate and reply to text messages. More than this, it also lets you send finger-doodles and taptic prods to other Watch owners; you can even share your heartbeat with an intimate contact.
If Apple’s own apps are of varied usefulness, third-party apps are even more limited. In fairness, Apple Watch developers have had very little time to feel out the capabilities of the device, and almost no-one has any experience of how users want to interact with a screen of this size. Already, we’re hearing about developers who dived into Apple Watch on day one and are now redesigning their applications in light of lessons quickly learnt.
The good news is that there’s plenty of potential here. The Watch itself may have limited processing power, but this isn’t a problem since very little code has to execute natively on the device. Apple Watch apps actually run mostly on your iPhone, with the Watch simply handling the display and controls.
However, this does mean that if your Watch isn’t within range of the iPhone, many apps won’t work. But that’s not as limiting as it may sound: the Watch communicates with the iPhone not only via Bluetooth, but also Wi-Fi. This means that even if your Watch is out of Bluetooth range of the iPhone, as long as the two are on the same network, everything will continue to work. If you’re in a home or office with a single logical network, you can leave your iPhone on the desk and your Watch will keep working anywhere around the building.
With the Watch so reliant on the iPhone, there is a danger that we could end up with growing amounts of data constantly flying back and forth between the two devices, slowing things down. To cut down on wasteful back-and-forthing, Apple says that
applications that run directly on the Watch itself will start to appear “later in the year” – although it hasn’t yet released details of how this will work, or what capabilities will be open to third-party developers.
As well as opening from the homescreen, apps can be quickly accessed via what Apple calls “Glances”. Simply put, a Glance is a single-screen interface that gives you the core information and features of an application. To access Glances, you swipe upwards from the bottom of the watch face: you’ll immediately see a page of information and controls related to one of your favourite apps. For example, a Glance for a podcast player might show the details of the podcast that’s playing currently, along with controls for skipping forward or back. A Glance for a weather app might display the forecast for your current location.
You can switch between app Glances by swiping left and right; up to 20 Glances can be active at once. Given that you have to swipe between them, this is probably a sensible limit.
■Fitness
Apple has strongly promoted the Watch as a fitness device, and it comes with two applications dedicated to supporting an active lifestyle: Activity and Workout.
As the name suggests, Activity is designed to encourage you to be more active. It tracks your progress towards daily activity goals in three categories: movement, exercise and standing. The movement goal you can set yourself, as a target in calories; the exercise goal is set at 30 minutes per day of brisk activity, such as jogging, working out or playing sport. The standing goal simply requires you to stand up for a few minutes each hour, in each of 12 hours during the day. As the day goes on, a concentric-ring display shows your progress towards each goal – red for movement, green for exercise and blue for standing.
Clearly, Activity isn’t intended for hardcore exercise bunnies. But for people like me, who simply need a bit of a nudge towards a more active lifestyle, it works well.
Workout, meanwhile, is about logging specific exercise activity. You can select from common types of workout such as running, walking or using an elliptical trainer or rowing machine. You then set yourself a goal, in terms of calories or time, and away you go. The Apple Watch logs what you do, and provides encouragement along the way by telling you when you’ve hit 50% of your goal. It’s basic, but it works effectively.
All the data from these two fitness apps, along with the number of steps you’ve taken each day and your heart rate, are fed into the Health app on your iPhone. This means the data can also be made available to other apps on your phone to which you’ve given permission.
In addition to the built-in offerings, there’s already a good selection of third-party fitness apps on the Apple Watch, from well-known brands such as Runtastic and Strava, plus more specialised apps such as FitStar Yoga and Hole19 for golf. The one limitation is that, since the Apple Watch lacks a built-in GPS receiver, it needs to be in range of your iPhone to fully track your motion. It can track your steps and heart rate without the phone to
“Already,developerswho
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ABOVEThe Watch tracks your progress towards your movement, exercise and standing goals
BELOWThe Apple Watch is controlled via a single button and the Digital Crown
@ P C P R O F A C E B O O K . C O M / P C P R O
SPECIFICATIONS
38mm model: 272 x 340 AMOLED display●optical heart-rate monitor●
accelerometer●gyroscope●IPX7 water
resistance●Bluetooth 4 LE●802.11n
Wi-Fi●1yr RTB warranty●watch body
only, 34.9 x 12.2 x 38.6mm (WDH)●48g
(including Sport strap) hand, and it will make a guess based
on previous data of the distance you’ve walked or run – but unless you’re carrying the iPhone with you, you can’t accurately track your distance or route.
The Apple Watch isn’t an iPhone owner’s only choice for fitness tracking. There are several more fitness-focused devices out there, including the iOS-compatible Basis Peak (see p72), which offers automatic exercise tracking and a wider range of metrics, such as skin temperature and perspiration levels. But for everyone except the most dedicated fitness fanatics, the Apple Watch is a more tempting all-round proposition. It’s easy to use, it tracks and analyses your activity in an intelligible way, and it’s extensible by third-party apps.