This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.
No it means you can't use wrist detection to auto-lock because the metallic pigments in some tattoos interferes with passive skin sensing. There's an option to turn it off.
How many people have metallic pigment tattoos on their wrists?
It's pretty exciting to anticipate how developers might do innovative things with the Watch...but until then, I'm pretty bearish of the device as something of real utility. It's not just the particulars of Apple's execution and implementation, but just that the physical form factor of a watch inherently limits it...and the coolest things we've seen watches do in fiction, such as Dick Tracy's wrist-walkie-talkie, are done just fine via smartphone. And glancing at your watch all the time is not much less of a social interruption than pulling out your phone.
What annoys me in reading consumer-facing reviews of the product is how much of the perceived potential is through things that should be done by software...for example, the ability to filter notifications from the phone...there's no reason why a second (or third, fourth, etc) layer of notification triage can't be implemented as a phone setting...in fact, I think iPhone's Do Not Disturb mode is fantastically better done than its Android equivalent. But to think that the Watch, or any ancillary device, is needed to inherently solve the problem of filtering information overload...it's as if rather than developing better spam filters, email providers just encouraged consumers to make multiple email accounts to handle the deluge.
So hopefully Apple increasingly opens up the API for developers, to do things far beyond what Apple has anticipated in its marketing plan.
Your comment on social interruption really resonates with me. As somebody who has been wearing a Pebble for a couple of years, the main utility I have discovered is in minimizing the number of times I take out my phone. But it's not really about reducing the onerous physical labor of putting my hand in my pocket. It's about being more present.
Right now I get wrist notifications maybe 5-10 times a day. E.g, my next meeting, a text message. I can sneak a glance in during a meeting and then either carry on or smoothly bring things to an end so I can deal with something urgent. That's about what I want; anything else can wait until I'm free, at which point I'll pull out my phone and skim the non-urgent stuff that has stacked up.
Despite having poked at the SDK, and despite having built a personal-use Android app in the meantime, I haven't really had the urge to build anything for the Pebble. I don't want more on my wrist.
Apple Watch v1 is a first step. I am pretty sure v2 will be huge. (akin to iPhone2 aka 3G, and iPad2)
For certain occasions like doing outdoor sport, an inbuilt low-power 2G phone modem would be awesome, so that one can use it without a smartphone in the pocket. One can also imagine an improved Siri app. Both combined with a improved battery that lasts 2+ days would be an instant buy.
Do you have an Apple Watch? Is this review based on your experiences using it for some time?
I think in practice some of your guesses about notifications and interruption are proving wrong for most people because of the phenomenology of the Taptic engine.
Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not block the functionality.
>Can I access the users Heart Rate? No.
This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be a priority. This works on AW right now.
This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want AW and Pebble to continue being the only smartwatch game in town. This seems to fall into the Apple conventional wisdom of, "New product? Wait until Rev A." AW isn't perfect but its kind of what I expect for a smartwatch platform. Its lightweight and somewhat of an accessory to your smartphone (not another app/ad platform), but still feature rich and developer friendly.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; I couldn't agree more. Not being able to build a watch face is incredible. Android Wear and Pebble both had this ability really quickly (Android Wear was at launch, I believe Pebble added it shortly thereafter) and much of this was done years ago.
But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.
Apple is almost always conservative with the feature set of software shipping on first-generation devices. Maybe they learned an important lesson in the 1990s about the dangers of not building on a solid foundation.
In time, Apple may change this and allow them. But with exposed functionality, start with a minimum viable product. What you add you can't easily remove.
[Caveat: I am not suggesting that there won't be a market for software that runs on the current generation of wrist located wearable computers. I just think as an interactive interface, the form factor will wind up as an evolutionary dead end for reasons similar to those by which touchpads have largely displaced trackballs.]
I referee soccer. This means that some number of times a year, I regularly get paid for an activity where a wristwatch is my only piece of tech and I rely on it while breathing heavily and making spectators, team officials and players express their unhappiness. I have half a dozen wristwatches in my referee bag. When I run center, I accumulate wristwatch-wearing-hours two at a time because I have to get things right. No amount of software sophistication can overcome the ergonomics of wristwatches.
The wristwatch form factor has poor ergonomics for an interactive device because it always requires two hands. Placing a small machine on the wrist puts it out of harms way by placing it behind our primary method for interacting with the physical world. Wristwatches work ergonomically because they require limited manipulation and are primarily displays.
To the degree wristwatches offer interaction, quick interactions are done by feel. Timex's Ironman series performs its intended function well because the lap button is easy to locate without looking. However, basic wristwatch ergonomics mean that hitting that button is two handed and slows down a runner. Even worse, bringing an arm across the chest briefly inhibits full expansion of the chest and thus lung capacity. Only because the information the watch provides is so valuable is such a biomechanical cost a viable engineering tradeoff.
Running a wristwatch off a phone turns two-handed one-device operations into potential two-or-three-handed two-device operations. Sure, the obvious solution is a voice interface...but when everything runs on the phone, then a wristwatch is just a bluetooth microphone with a small display...with wrist mounted microphone versus headset mounted.
On the other hand, The wrist is a well protected place for mounting sensitive equipment on the body and the wristwatch is a reasonable form factor for sensors, yet in the long run serious sensor platforms want to be open as do the platforms for analysis of sensor data. Proprietary interfaces are not likely to be the direct road to the quantified self.
Interesting that apple seems to be following the same model as they did with their mobile devices in terms of developer functionality. Their view seems to be to start off really tightly locked down and then gradually open up additional features to developers. It makes sense in that its much easier to open stuff up after its been locked down then to lock down stuff once people have built stuff on it.
I think this goes well with their other line of thought:"It is so difficult to remove a feature once we've added it, so it is best to be careful adding new features and start with a few great features first." That's how they have developed iOS.
I recall a high-ranking individual (Jobs, Cook, or Forstall) from Apple saying this a couple of years ago, but I don't remember when, where, or context. Sorry.
"Your Apple Watch app acts like a separate process running on a separate device, however behind the scenes the OS runs a ‘skeleton’ like version of your host application on the user's iPhone and the Apple Watch extension in tandem, both on the iPhone"
I totally missed this limitation until now. So the iWatch works only if you have an iPhone and the phone is in communication range with the watch?
What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?
> What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?
I believe the watch face continues to work but anything that requires interacting with non-native apps (most of apple's apps are native on the watch fyi) or network connectivity just won't work. On the plus side it will work with bluetooth and wifi so you can at least go some [minor] distance away from your watch. But this same limitation exists in Android Wear and Pebble as well (though Pebble has native applications so less of an issue there).
You can still go on a run, for example, without the phone and listen to a few gigs worth of music. There's apparently a bit of machine learning that allows the watch to do all of its health metrics on your run, once it has gotten to know your patterns.
To clarify--this is a plain-English rundown of the features and functions that a developer can include when building an Apple Watch app. For example, it says that devs do not have direct API access to force touch or the digital crown.
(As opposed to a consumers' view of what you can do with it.)
However, development for the Time so far hasn't been as easy as I'd thought, e.g. some of the examples provided to develop watch-faces, etc. online didn't seem to be fully up-to-date to use with color/Time.
Every restriction that Apple made makes total sense for the short/medium term. Watch faces need to be impeccably programmed or are likely to dramatically reduce battery life (some of the existing ones use OpenGL). Developers shouldn't be redefining the behaviour of force touch or digital crown before users have had a chance to properly learn them and access to heart rate surely had FDA implications.
Tim Cook has stated that the focus for iOS development through to version 9 and likely a release or two afterwards will be performance and stability. Only then if Apple can push the battery life a few extra hours will they likely open the platform up a bit more.
Fully agree with the author how amazing it is seeing so many buggy apps after having a week to play with my watch. Even from some of the established players e.g. getting quota exceeded errors using Twitter.
They will probably "unlock" all the features you want in the upcoming version so people will buy those to have things that should have been there from the beginning.
I am having trouble finding a reason to strap a $400+ device to my wrist. I have not had a need to wear a watch permanently for over 20 years. Heart rate monitor? I have a Polar watch in my gym bag for that. Swimming? I have several swim watches, however, I will typically use a finger-mounted SportCount because it doesn't require interrupting the stroke to bring both hands together to operated (you operate it with your thumb, single handed). Time? I have my phone, computer, TV, microwave and, yes, el-cheapo LED nightstand clock for that. Even while travelling if I don't feel like taking my phone out of my pocket there are clocks everywhere. And, you might laugh, but years of sailing, kayaking and outdoor activities have taught me to estimate time to a useful degree of certainty by looking at the position of the sun. Silly, I know. I am simply saying that I can't remember the las tome I thought "If I only had a watch on my wrist permanently...". Anwering the phone? Please.
One thing that I've always imagined but haven't heard much in these discussions is the real potential behind the Apple Watch being the near-magical NFC interactions that could be achieved with its position on the body. For example, paying for groceries, opening locked doors, starting cars, etc. I feel that someone would only need to see a Watch user wave their hand and magically do something once before wanting that same "power".
For cars that problem has been solved for several years--keyless entry / ignition is pretty common these days (with the added advantage that your key lasts for years without charging and you can give it to someone).
You can do bi-directional notifications between host app and extension with MMWormhole, which uses CFNotificationCenter: https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMWormhole
I think overall Apple has done a fantastic job of v1 of this product line, it's pretty polished. As an App developer who has been working on a watch App, while there is a lot you can't do I understand why you can't do it, it will come in time (native Apps later this year), and what is there right now is pretty good. Shameless plug, the App is currently in review: http://napkin.io
WWDC is right around the corner, so we're likely to see the APIs open up a bit.
Apple's rollout strategy makes sense here. Restrict the number of ways developers can kill the battery, because it's the Watch people will blame, not the poorly engineered apps.
Probably developers who want to make money off a "free" sales model. In an age of widely-known popular logos, might not take much space at all to render an "ad".
The exclusion of ads from the Watch could (wild speculation here) point to a future without ads in the Apple ecosystem. Ads are typically obnoxious, tolerated only because the host app is free. Given their very un-Apple-like feel, maybe there's a plan to wean them out of the walled garden.
I've been working on a pretty complicated watch app that will be going live to our users in the next few days. The simulator actually does a pretty good job at faking a real watch. I was worried about the communication between the phone and the watch over Bluetooth being slower then the simulator however I've had a apple watch since Friday and there is no noticeable delay (though I'm not sending images)
In the time window just before release apps with WatchKit extensions went from "Waiting For Review" to "Ready for Sale" in less than 24h with the "In Review" time lasting less than an hour. Now we're back to 48 - 72h review times
Personal anecdote: I got one and am happy with it so far. I roam around the house / office without really thinking about where my phone is. The health aspects have been the stickiest feature for me -- I actually appreciate the "stand up for a bit" notifications, and enjoy hitting my daily goals.
Phone calls work surprisingly well -- much better than speaker phone IMHO, because you don't have to hold a phone, and you don't really need to hold your watch up to your face either.
Voice recognition is solid.
Glancing at a notification feels a lot less distracting than digging out my phone to see of it's important and then getting sucked in because now my phone is open. (I know, self-discipline...)
The customizable watch faces make me wish the phone had a similar feature -- I find myself trying to "glance" at my phone, expecting it to light up automatically. My face has the weather, calendar, and activity tracker on it, so I get a lot of use out of that.
The build quality is nice (I went steel, and it definitely has a luxury feel to it).
Mostly it has a fun retro-future quality to it. Some apps are a little buggy, but it doesn't really matter -- we're living in the future :)
Interesting that they are using a separate process on the iPhone. Is that to prepare for a future where the whole extension will actually run on the watch itself?
[+] [-] res0nat0r|11 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_ta...
[+] [-] julianpye|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhhhh|11 years ago|reply
But seriously, how could Apple not test this?
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] r00fus|11 years ago|reply
How many people have metallic pigment tattoos on their wrists?
[+] [-] danso|11 years ago|reply
What annoys me in reading consumer-facing reviews of the product is how much of the perceived potential is through things that should be done by software...for example, the ability to filter notifications from the phone...there's no reason why a second (or third, fourth, etc) layer of notification triage can't be implemented as a phone setting...in fact, I think iPhone's Do Not Disturb mode is fantastically better done than its Android equivalent. But to think that the Watch, or any ancillary device, is needed to inherently solve the problem of filtering information overload...it's as if rather than developing better spam filters, email providers just encouraged consumers to make multiple email accounts to handle the deluge.
So hopefully Apple increasingly opens up the API for developers, to do things far beyond what Apple has anticipated in its marketing plan.
[+] [-] wpietri|11 years ago|reply
Right now I get wrist notifications maybe 5-10 times a day. E.g, my next meeting, a text message. I can sneak a glance in during a meeting and then either carry on or smoothly bring things to an end so I can deal with something urgent. That's about what I want; anything else can wait until I'm free, at which point I'll pull out my phone and skim the non-urgent stuff that has stacked up.
Despite having poked at the SDK, and despite having built a personal-use Android app in the meantime, I haven't really had the urge to build anything for the Pebble. I don't want more on my wrist.
[+] [-] frik|11 years ago|reply
For certain occasions like doing outdoor sport, an inbuilt low-power 2G phone modem would be awesome, so that one can use it without a smartphone in the pocket. One can also imagine an improved Siri app. Both combined with a improved battery that lasts 2+ days would be an instant buy.
[+] [-] ForrestN|11 years ago|reply
I think in practice some of your guesses about notifications and interruption are proving wrong for most people because of the phenomenology of the Taptic engine.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|11 years ago|reply
Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not block the functionality.
>Can I access the users Heart Rate? No.
This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be a priority. This works on AW right now.
This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want AW and Pebble to continue being the only smartwatch game in town. This seems to fall into the Apple conventional wisdom of, "New product? Wait until Rev A." AW isn't perfect but its kind of what I expect for a smartwatch platform. Its lightweight and somewhat of an accessory to your smartphone (not another app/ad platform), but still feature rich and developer friendly.
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|11 years ago|reply
But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.
[+] [-] jsz0|11 years ago|reply
Apple is almost always conservative with the feature set of software shipping on first-generation devices. Maybe they learned an important lesson in the 1990s about the dangers of not building on a solid foundation.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|11 years ago|reply
In time, Apple may change this and allow them. But with exposed functionality, start with a minimum viable product. What you add you can't easily remove.
[+] [-] brudgers|11 years ago|reply
I referee soccer. This means that some number of times a year, I regularly get paid for an activity where a wristwatch is my only piece of tech and I rely on it while breathing heavily and making spectators, team officials and players express their unhappiness. I have half a dozen wristwatches in my referee bag. When I run center, I accumulate wristwatch-wearing-hours two at a time because I have to get things right. No amount of software sophistication can overcome the ergonomics of wristwatches.
The wristwatch form factor has poor ergonomics for an interactive device because it always requires two hands. Placing a small machine on the wrist puts it out of harms way by placing it behind our primary method for interacting with the physical world. Wristwatches work ergonomically because they require limited manipulation and are primarily displays.
To the degree wristwatches offer interaction, quick interactions are done by feel. Timex's Ironman series performs its intended function well because the lap button is easy to locate without looking. However, basic wristwatch ergonomics mean that hitting that button is two handed and slows down a runner. Even worse, bringing an arm across the chest briefly inhibits full expansion of the chest and thus lung capacity. Only because the information the watch provides is so valuable is such a biomechanical cost a viable engineering tradeoff.
Running a wristwatch off a phone turns two-handed one-device operations into potential two-or-three-handed two-device operations. Sure, the obvious solution is a voice interface...but when everything runs on the phone, then a wristwatch is just a bluetooth microphone with a small display...with wrist mounted microphone versus headset mounted.
On the other hand, The wrist is a well protected place for mounting sensitive equipment on the body and the wristwatch is a reasonable form factor for sensors, yet in the long run serious sensor platforms want to be open as do the platforms for analysis of sensor data. Proprietary interfaces are not likely to be the direct road to the quantified self.
[+] [-] rikf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joakleaf|11 years ago|reply
I recall a high-ranking individual (Jobs, Cook, or Forstall) from Apple saying this a couple of years ago, but I don't remember when, where, or context. Sorry.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|11 years ago|reply
I totally missed this limitation until now. So the iWatch works only if you have an iPhone and the phone is in communication range with the watch?
What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|11 years ago|reply
I believe the watch face continues to work but anything that requires interacting with non-native apps (most of apple's apps are native on the watch fyi) or network connectivity just won't work. On the plus side it will work with bluetooth and wifi so you can at least go some [minor] distance away from your watch. But this same limitation exists in Android Wear and Pebble as well (though Pebble has native applications so less of an issue there).
[+] [-] gdubs|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|11 years ago|reply
(As opposed to a consumers' view of what you can do with it.)
[+] [-] lighthawk|11 years ago|reply
However, development for the Time so far hasn't been as easy as I'd thought, e.g. some of the examples provided to develop watch-faces, etc. online didn't seem to be fully up-to-date to use with color/Time.
[+] [-] threeseed|11 years ago|reply
Tim Cook has stated that the focus for iOS development through to version 9 and likely a release or two afterwards will be performance and stability. Only then if Apple can push the battery life a few extra hours will they likely open the platform up a bit more.
Fully agree with the author how amazing it is seeing so many buggy apps after having a week to play with my watch. Even from some of the established players e.g. getting quota exceeded errors using Twitter.
[+] [-] baldfat|11 years ago|reply
I still think people just don't wear watches will cause watches to be a very minimal form of wearables.
I seriously would wear a bracelet that had a larger usable surface and longer battery life and faster cpu :)
[+] [-] duiker101|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nasalgoat|11 years ago|reply
Once we had a watch we discovered tons of bugs that didn't show up before.
[+] [-] rebootthesystem|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brosky117|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonknee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwily|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dignick|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProAm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|11 years ago|reply
Apple's rollout strategy makes sense here. Restrict the number of ways developers can kill the battery, because it's the Watch people will blame, not the poorly engineered apps.
[+] [-] korvenadi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|11 years ago|reply
The exclusion of ads from the Watch could (wild speculation here) point to a future without ads in the Apple ecosystem. Ads are typically obnoxious, tolerated only because the host app is free. Given their very un-Apple-like feel, maybe there's a plan to wean them out of the walled garden.
[+] [-] josefresco|11 years ago|reply
Advertising models like this (contextual notification powered offers) must exist for smartphones already - anyone know the leader in this segment?
[+] [-] kenrikm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epaga|11 years ago|reply
Yes, you can: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-for-apple-watch/id98... or https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flip-coin-coin-flip-decision... for example. Pretty amazing that apps like those two got the green light from the App Store Review Team.
[+] [-] c1sc0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gdubs|11 years ago|reply
Phone calls work surprisingly well -- much better than speaker phone IMHO, because you don't have to hold a phone, and you don't really need to hold your watch up to your face either.
Voice recognition is solid.
Glancing at a notification feels a lot less distracting than digging out my phone to see of it's important and then getting sucked in because now my phone is open. (I know, self-discipline...)
The customizable watch faces make me wish the phone had a similar feature -- I find myself trying to "glance" at my phone, expecting it to light up automatically. My face has the weather, calendar, and activity tracker on it, so I get a lot of use out of that.
The build quality is nice (I went steel, and it definitely has a luxury feel to it).
Mostly it has a fun retro-future quality to it. Some apps are a little buggy, but it doesn't really matter -- we're living in the future :)
[+] [-] sylvinus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puppetmaster3|11 years ago|reply