Apple Watch 8 Uninstalled
After wearing a simple Pulsar analog watch for years, and then not wearing a watch at all, I convinced myself a month ago that an Apple Watch 8 would be an improvement. Part of that decision was based on my hipster IT colleagues being surprised I was not wearing a smartwatch. I also noticed my girlfriend practically can't live without hers, and then I saw this endless stream of youtube videos with raving reviews of (lets be honest) pretty biased people.
The first week was okay and I had fun with my new toy. It is fast, reacts well to touch input, measures sleep, charges in 30 minutes or so, shows the time and my calendar when I raise my wrist, wakes me up by tapping on my wrist without waking the whole house. But then there were some little annoyances.
All push messages are equal
When a message arrives and you have set your Apple Watch to "match the iPhone notification settings", you will notice that the Apple watch actually does not match those settings. On my iPhone I have carefully set all notifications sounds so that I can tell the difference between a group message in an unimportant group, or an important message from family or friends.
The Apple Watch does not care. All push messages sound like "Ding" and have the same vibration pattern. This means that you always have to raise your wrist and look at your watch to be able to tell if it was an important message or not. This means that I went from not having to look at my phone, I now needed to look at my wrist on every "Ding".
It is amazing that a computer on your wrist which can play music from internal storage, stream it over bluetooth to your earbuds, listens to "Hey Siri" and can even be your speakerphone cannot even mimic the short simple notification sounds from your phone. There is simply no way, the Aple Watch only has 8 built in sounds for notifications, and that's it.
Quick replies are funky
The Apple Watch supports an on-screen keyboard (which is pretty tiny and almost impossible to type on) and some pretty good speech recognition to be able to reply to messages. The best idea however is the "Quick Reply". Being able to have pre-defined responses like "Yes thanks" or "No thank you" or "Call you back later" is a pretty good feature for a smart watch. However, on the Apple Watch it does not always work. I'm not sure if it is supposed to guess the language or not, but it often shows you predefined responses in the wrong language.
Even worse, the predefined responses only work in iMessage. When you receive a Telegram or Whatsapp message you are in the hands of the developer of that app. This makes the experience very inconsistent, and most of those apps don't even let you create or change predefined responses.
Standup! But sitdown!
The Apple Watch is really good in reminding you to stand up, do exercize, reward you with fake medals. It almost reminds you too poop regularly. If you like that stuff the Apple Watch is for you. But you have to deal with one really annoying detail: These reminders are only triggered exactly 10 minutes before the whole hour.
In my iPhone I have set the calendar so that new events automatically get a reminder 10 minutes before start. Really handy for meetings in the office. But when those meetings start at the top of the hour, the 10 minute reminder coincides with the reminder to stand up. At 50 minutes past the hour, my wrist was notification chaos.
The watch face you can't get
If you have configured focus modes like I have, the iPhone and the Apple Watch go into "Nightstand" mode between 22:00 and 08:00. Only contacts in my favourites list can call or ping me at those times. The Apple Watch shows a really nice watch face that looks like a classic alarm clock. A nice green color, nice font, no frills. It is surprising that this watch face is not selectable as a default watch face on the Apple Watch. Some watch faces are "more special than others" I guess.
The disappearing workouts
The Apple watch knows when you are working out. It can detect and start recording a workout for different sports. You can switch off the autodetect and manually start a workout recording, which I preferred. A little downside is that I wasn't able to create a "Padel" workout type so I used "Tennis" for that.
After the workout, when you open the Health app on your iPhone, you'll notice that... the workout is not there. You need to open a special separate app to view the heartrate data during your workout, for some strange reason. The workout app on the iPhone is very limited, there is no pinch and zoom to see your data in the detail you'd like.
Nice for casual hipster sporting, but not for serious athletes or data nerds.
No time for you
If you want the battery of the Apple Watch to last for more than 24 hours, you need to play with the settings and disable some services. Disabeling the "Hey Siri" is one of the better ways to save battery life, The other thing I disabled was the "always on" display, also because I think that the watch faces are funny and functional, but not really beautiful. They don't give that luxurious watch feeling.
If you configue the watch that way, you have to raise your wrist to have the watch display the time. When your wrist is already almost in that posution (like when typing on a keyboard), the twist of the wrist is often not enough to actually turn on the display. If you are easily annoyed by little things like this you'll understand that this started to be an annoyance.
Hip to be square
One of the things that always held me back from buying an Apple Watch is that it is a square watch. I think it is not a very flattering or elegant design. I bought the small version (41mm) because the bigger version looks like you strapped an iPhone 1 to your wrist, and that just looks silly. I am a fan of round watches, and the Apple Watch simply isn't.
Walkie Talkie lock-in
The Walkie Talkie app on the Apple Watch is fun. Being able to talk to someone all the time gives a funny connected feeling. It is also a bit dangerous in meetings, so luckily you can also switch it off temporarily. The technology used for the Walkie Talkie audio stream is likely a FaceTime Audio stream. Too bad that the Walkie Talkie app is not also on your iPhone, I think I would have like that, just for fun.
Then again, after a few times having fun with it, the Walkie Talkie app is not a deal breaker. It is a funny gimmick that might come in handy in the supermarket or when playing in the garden, but for serious applications it is a bit finnicky. It looses connection easily, reconnecting takes some time, and sending a Whatsapp Audio message is not very different.
So is it any good?
If you are in the market for a smartwatch and you like Apple products like I do, the Apple Watch is probably fine for you. It does the job, it has an Apple Logo and is of good build quality. No worries there. If you're really picky like I am, you'll run into the limitations I listed above pretty fast.
Tip: If you do buy one, I recommend buying the elastic braded solo strap for it, it's really comfortable and thin.
The ECG app is very impressive and could be really helpful for people who want or need to check how their hart is beating. It can give a good indication of atrial fibrillation and might help you to contact a doctor in time.
I tried the Apple Watch for a good month, wearing it day and night. I had good fun with it, but when the novelty wears off I think it underperforms as a regular watch, and feels like an old tamagotchi. It constantly requires your attention, breaks your concentration, distracts you during conversations, and gives up on you when you don't charge it daily.
So in the end, I gave it to my girlfriend and replaced it with a Seiko 5 Automatic field watch, model SNK803. I went from simple quartz to full smartwatch to a full mechanical watch without any electronics at all. It is a much nicer watch to look at and does not feel like a screaming kid on my arm.
Choose whatever works for you, have fun!