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Apple Watch Launches
An anonymous reader writes: The Apple Watch's release date has arrived: retailers around the world have quietly begun putting them on their shelves, and customers are beginning to receive their shipments. Reviews have been out for a while, including thoughtful ones from John Gruber and Nilay Patel. Apple has published a full user guide for the software, and iFixit has put up a full teardown to take a look at the hardware. They give it a repairability score of 5 out of 10, saying that the screen and battery are easily replaced, but not much else is. Though Apple designated the watch "water-resistant" rather than "waterproof", early tests show it's able to withstand a shower and a swim in the pool without failing. Ars has an article about the difficulty of making games for the Apple Watch, and Wired has a piece detailing its creation.
... PT Barnum. You know the famous quote.
I'm still not entirely clear what the Apple Watch is supposed to do for me, especially when it's still reliant on a cell phone to function.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not PT Barnum, because I see this as a niche product that some people will really like. People who are fanatic about their fitbit and facebook feeds. Since it's "Apple" it may be a bit more popular than Glass.. but time will tell.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The watch conforms to the standard IPX7, which states "withstand immersion in water up to 1 meter for up to 30 minutes"
The video only tests fifteen minutes... I would have liked to see a half hour test, then see if it works, then back in for an hour and see what happened.
Apple recommends that you not swim with the watch, but if you're hardly going under water or not swimming very long it seems like it would be fine.
As for wearing the watch in the shower, it seems like it would be fine but it sounds creepy to me (yes I know Tim Cook says he does that). Even when I had fully waterproof watches I never wore one in the shower, it's like taping over parts you don't want to actually clean... defeats the point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ars has an article about the difficulty of making games for the Apple Watch
Honestly, I think games are a bit of a stretch. Maybe I'm just a stupid old man, but I kind of feel like smart-watches should do very little, but everything they do, they should do in a simple, obvious, transparent manner. If you want to play games, just pull out your phone.
Now of course someone is going to say, "What's wrong with extra functionality? If you don't want it, just don't use it." All I would say is, if I had my say in the design, I'd make the UI as simple as possible, and make the battery last as long as possible. Adding a bunch of unnecessary features and games that require a bunch of processing power are likely to run contrary to both of those goals. If you gave me the choice of being able to play Angry Birds on my watch, or shaving off a couple of ounces while extending battery life for 5 hours, I'd definitely choose the latter.
...who even wears watches anymore?
At least a million people.
Yes I want a tiny screen, inferior battery and all around crap experience please!
So... all you want is a desktop computer and everybody else in the world should, too. You know what's funny is I remember this reaction to tablets, smartphones, and cameras with cell phones. Nerd hipsterism is strange.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It extends the battery life of your phone because you are not powering it on as often.
It allows you to filter notifications more than the phone does, so you can know quicker if you should pay attention to an alert.
It allows you to silence a call without even reaching into your pocket doing the Vibration Reaction Dance.
It gives you status on important things happening currently with fewer actions than a phone.
It's like a fitness band you wear all the time but without the single minded pointlessness.
And yes, it also tells the time without having to reach into a pocket...
If you aren't clear what it can do for you, then you may not need or want a smart watch. And that is fine. But there are many small uses which aggregate to form a model, different for each person, of how a smart watch can be useful to them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
said every writer at Wired.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Is there a version that has a cock-ring instead of a wrist band?
Thanks!
So constantly communicating wirelessly with a device on my wrist is more battery efficient than turning the screen on once in a while?
The OCCASIONAL communication the watch does over BTLE (it's not continuous unless needed by an app) is in fact WAY lower power than turning on a very large high DPI screen and backlight that most smartphones have now.
Except that you can't wear it all the time because it's not waterproof. You even have to take it off in the shower.
Didn't even bother to read the article summary all the way through, did you.
No it's not waterproof. But it's got a pretty standard level of water resistance, which means you COULD wear it in a shower, and I plan to wear it for visits to the pool (since most of my pool time is technically more "standing in water" than swimming).
Also, it only gets around 18 hours of use on the battery
Hint: That's around as much "battery" as most PEOPLE have also. :-)
which means it can't track your sleep like a lot of other fitness devices.
Then you can switch to a device that doesn't suck at monitoring sleep the way something on your wrist meant to mostly measure heart-rate does.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In exchange for wearing a 2nd device you need to charge every day or so. Not much of a win.
For those that run down phones in less than a day they may not have to do a mid-day charge any longer. That's actually quite a huge win.
Thereby saving you time only if you can ignore most notifications
You are ignoring the tiering of notifications possible with this arrangement.
Lol. true, but how much is that worth, right?
I guess you don't mind people wondering why you find the insides of your pants so suddenly interesting.
But retains the pointlessness of wearing a fitness band.
Well I basically agree as I don't use a fitness band and don't really plan to use any of the health features of the new watch. But I'm not turning that off either...
Functionality handled better by a non-smart watch.
Yes but that is balanced by the paucity of other abilities a non-watch have. That singular function has not provided enough value for a decade or so now to warrant my wearing a watch at all. But it IS more functional than pulling out the phone so for the HUGE number of people who have stopped wearing watches, that is a net positive feature
Honestly my main complaint with the apple watch is the lock in to apple. ...If you want a smart watch fine, but have the sense to buy one that works with any phone.
So then you must equally hate Android Wear.
Myself I personally think devices that are better integrated will provide notable better function, in terms of both performance and battery life.
I also ordered a Pebble Time, so I'll see...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley