DSC03150It has been a week since my Apple Watch showed up on my doorstep. So far, I’m mostly impressed with what I’ve seen and experienced. The Watch has lived up to my expectations so far, and I’m happy with my purchase overall.

The Apple Watch isn’t my first smartwatch. (That honor belongs to a Pebble that now resides in my nightstand.) However, it is the best one I’ve owned, and the best one I’ve seen. Here are some of the things that I think make it stand out:

Fitness on my wrist

I’ve been using my iPhone to track my fitness ever since I had a bad run-in with a rash caused by the Fitbit Force. While it has kept me on track fitness-wise, and my own regimen has helped, I had forgotten just how powerful it is to have access to information about my fitness right on my wrist.

Right now, my watch’s face includes a small glyph that shows the three rings of the Activity app: calories burned, minutes of exercise and number of hours I’ve taken a break from being sedentary to move around a bit. Apple calls the last one the “Stand” ring, but I’ve found that’s a bit of a misnomer: I work at a standing desk, and it will say that I haven’t stood up even if I’ve been standing for an hour.

DSC03159Quibbles aside, the real power of all three is that it’s a quick and easy way for me to judge how I’m doing fitness-wise just by glancing at my watch face. I can see (roughly) how many minutes of physical activity I’ve put in, how active I’ve been in a given day overall, and whether or not I’ve managed to move around, all just from taking a quick glance at the Watch. Those rings also sync with a companion app on the iPhone which will show a record of each day at a glance.

I’m already noticing changes in my behavior inspired by the Activity rings. I’m walking more, and am generally more mindful about moving around than I was a week ago. I don’t meet my fitness goals every day of the week, but it’s a good reminder to me about how I need to get out and go do something.

FullSizeRender 2An app ecosystem that mirrors my phone

One of my biggest criticisms of the Pebble is that its apps never quite lived up to the selection that was available on my iPhone. The Apple Watch should solve that…eventually. Just a few weeks after launch, several of the key apps I rely on already have a Watch app available, but I’m still missing some features that I love.

Still, there are some standouts that are well worth a look for anyone who owns an Apple Watch. The OmniFocus app makes it possible for me to work on my to-do lists while I’m on the go, and has become an even more indispensible productivity tool. It’s easy for me to see what I need to take care of in a given day at a glance, without having to pull out and fiddle with my phone.

I also couldn’t live without Transit, an app that provides real-time arrival data for, well, public transit. I use it whenever I need to get around, and it helps me make sure I don’t spend time uselessly twiddling my thumbs waiting for a bus that’s running behind schedule (which is fairly common here in San Francisco.) It’s unfortunately not as accurate in Seattle, but it’s priceless to be able to see, on my wrist, real-time predictions showing how long it will be until the next bus shows up.

I’ve tested two Twitter apps and found both wanting. Twitter’s official client is notable for allowing users to scroll through recent tweets from their friends on their wrist, but the app doesn’t call out mentions, retweets and other notifications. Twitterrific handles mentions, but doesn’t show your whole timeline. Neither app supports direct messaging, which is what I found myself actually wanting most from my Watch.

Screen Shot 2015-05-15 at 2.11.29 PMWrist-based convenience for features I already loved

Siri has been a key part of my daily workflow since its introduction with the iPhone 4S, and Apple’s digital assistant has been steadily improving since then to the point where I rely on it for creating reminders, sending text messages, checking on my calendar and controlling music playback. All of that was before I got the Watch. Now, I’m leaning on it even more, since all I have to do is tilt my wrist up to my face, say “Hey Siri,” and then I’m off to the races.

The wrist rotation detection means that the Watch won’t react to every instance of the phrase (unlike other iOS devices, which are a bit more trigger-happy in that regard), and the microphone is good enough that I can talk to my wrist in the middle of a busy San Francisco street – though I don’t see myself wanting to do that a whole lot.

I cook a good deal, and I have been frustrated by having to fiddle with my iPhone or iPad while in the middle of dicing onions or sautéing kale. By putting hands-free support for Siri in the Watch, Apple has made it possible for me to control my phone without getting it dirty from whatever ingredient I happen to be handling at a given moment.

In addition, there’s also the matter of Apple Pay, and wrist-based payments in general. I’ve found Apple’s mobile payment system to be incredibly useful where it’s available, but it still requires that I have my phone out of my pocket and ready to use. By contrast, I went and bought a drink at a local Peet’s Coffee yesterday, and paid for it before the barista had even noticed I tapped anything.

The convenience of it shocked me. I wasn’t prepared for something quite so seamless – even the process of using Touch ID on my iPhone 6 is more cumbersome than that. Of course, most merchants don’t accept Apple Pay, so unless I wanted to do all of my grocery shopping at Whole Foods (I don’t), this convenience won’t be part of my daily life.

AppleWatchTableSome room for improvement

From where I stand, the Apple Watch is the best smartwatch on the market today. But it’s not perfect, nor was it meant to be. This is a very good 1.0 product, through and through. There’s some low-hanging fruit for Apple to fix, especially when it comes to the sensitivity of the Watch’s wrist-rotation sensing. There have been a number of times when I’ve started doing something inside an app, rotated my wrist a few degrees, and then poked at the screen in frustration since it turned off automatically.

Ideally, this is something Apple can fix in software. I realize it’s a feature designed to prevent unintentional voice commands and maximize the Watch’s battery, but I hope Apple can lighten it up a bit going forward.

I’d also like to see Apple allow developers to run apps natively on the device. Once they’ve loaded, the apps tend to be fairly performant, but they can often be a bit slow to start up, especially if they require location information. A lot of observers expect Apple to introduce this capability sometime soon, but it’s not clear when (or if) that will happen.

Of course, as with any Apple product, there’s a good chance that the Watch will get thinner and lighter over time. Adding a GPS chip would be a nice addition as well, but I don’t think that the watch has to be wholly self-sufficient in order to be a successful product at the end of the day. We keep our smartphones nearby for most of the day, and I think that outsourcing a lot of the heavy lifting to the larger device ultimately makes sense for the Apple Watch, even long-term.

Overall, this isn’t an indispensable accessory. If my Watch was to somehow float away, I’d certainly miss it, but I don’t feel tied to it in the way that I do my iPhone. It’s an accessory for people who really want all of the features of a smartwatch – if that’s not you, that’s okay. The Watch will likely only appeal to a subset of iPhone owners during its lifetime as a product, even as it grows in popularity.

For those people who want in on the smartwatch train right now, the Apple Watch is a good option. Those people who would rather wait and see are also perfectly justified: I fully expect it’s going to get better with time.

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