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Life's Too Short For Slow Computers (theverge.com)
Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge looks back the Apple Watch, the company's first wearable device which went on sale roughly a year ago. In the article, Patel notes that Apple Watch, a computing product, is just too slow at doing some of the most basic things such as running apps. He writes: Here's the problem with the Apple Watch: it's slow. It was slow when it was first announced, it was slow when it came out, and it stayed slow when Watch OS 2.0 arrived. When I reviewed it last year, the slowness was so immediately annoying that I got on the phone with Apple to double check their performance expectations before making "it's kind of slow" the opening of the review. [...] The grand ambition of the Apple Watch is to be a full-fledged computer on your wrist, and right now it's a very slow computer. If Apple believes the watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch's processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves.
As long as the smartwatch needs to be tethered to your phone, it shouldn't have to be a computing powerhouse. Apple's Watch has been cart-before-horse from the start, and the battery tech just doesn't exist yet to make it a product that doesn't suck. It'll be years before the Watch, as Apple has it envisioned, is decent enough to not be a pain in the ass.
Pebble got this one right, and Apple should have taken their cues from them. E-ink displays are where it's at now if you need to maximize battery life, and their latest color e-ink displays are actually quite pretty. They're not chocked head-to-toe with features like the Watch, but back in the day Apple used to be about user experience first, features second. Amazing how Cook managed to derail all that in such a short time.
Its just a non-essential toy anyway. It does absolutely nothing that isn't done on a phone far better. The only reason to buy it is for the oneupmanship that fanboys love to play.
I don't have an iPhone or Apple Watch, but can't you just set an alarm by talking to it? You know, like how I can say to my Android tablet:
"OK Google, set alarm for 6:30 AM" or "OK Google, set timer for 20 minutes"