Living With an Apple Watch

For the past four weeks, I've been wearing an Apple Watch, and almost every day someone asks me how I like it. I usually say that I like it, but don't love it. The Apple Watch is clearly the best smartwatch I've tried, and certainly the best looking, but it suffers from some hardware and software limitations that stop it from being the revelation that, say, the iPhone 3G was.

On the hardware side, it looks and feels like a high-end watch. I am using the 38mm stainless steel version, and I went with the smaller size as I have relatively small wrists and most smartwatches have simply felt too big. In contrast, the Apple Watch looks pretty good. While I wouldn't object to it being thinner, it's still pretty thin, and just looks like a watch a professional would wear. It's not too obtrusive, and fits well under a jacket sleeve. The screen is bright and clear.

Of course, the watch is designed as an iPhone companion. It tells time and keeps a small calendar without an iPhone, for requires the phone to be connected for almost everything else.

The hardware includes a touch screen that you use mostly to select applications and move between screens, and a digital crown, which looks like the crown that you would use to set a traditional watch and lets you scroll through options. The touch screen is a bit different from the other Apple products in that it uses what the company calls "Force Touch," meaning that for some things, such as to change watch faces, you press harder, rather than just a basic light tap. In addition, you can touch a button underneath the crown once to get to your list of friends (which you set on your phone) and twice to enable Apple Pay.

These all work well, but it does take a bit of trial and error to get used to the different choices. It's not quite as simple as the single-button and touch-screen interface of the iPhone or iPads, and it took me a couple of days of really using it—and often ending up on screens where I didn't want to be—to really get the hang of it. I can't help but wonder what Steve Jobs, who famously hated additional buttons, would have thought. But it works and after a while, it becomes second nature.

The one real hardware concern is battery life: the trade-off for the bright, color screen and the relatively thin design is that you need to charge the watch every night. That's not a big issue for me—I never wear a watch to sleep and have never had the watch not make it through a day—but it is far from ideal, and also limits certain apps, such as those that track your sleep. It charges via an induction connection so you just place the watch on the charger without plugging it in, which is pretty nice.

You can choose from a very good variety of watch faces. The fairly traditional default or "utility" face has a round clock and some basic time, weather, and appointment data. And it comes with a variety of more complex and fun faces, such as ones focused on astronomy and with a Mickey Mouse animation that taps its foot every second. While I usually leave it on the more standard default, it's good to be able to change it, say for the weekend.

Like almost every smartwatch, it handles the basic functions well—and those are the ones that I find myself using the most. It can automatically remind you of appointments and show you incoming texts and phone calls. You can set a list of friends for easy contacts, and it will then show you their emails as they arrive. By pressing the button under the crown, you can pull up the list of contacts (which you navigate through by dialing the crown), and then can quickly call, text, or send them a little drawing you do on the touch screen. (At this point, the option of sending someone a drawing or my heart rate—another option—is mostly theoretical to me. None of my frequent contacts has an Apple Watch.)

For the most part, this has worked quite well. It's been flawless at reminding me of appointments; the messages are easy to read and come in with a little sound or haptic vibration. You can choose from some quick replies to texts, and these seem pretty good. I did run into one annoying issue—initially, it would not display texts from my wife even though I was getting texts from other people. The answer, courtesy of the Apple Genius bar—was to pick a different entry from her from my address book, though there was nothing obviously wrong with the contact I chose at first. (My wife appears in my address books from multiple different email accounts.)

In addition to traditional smartwatches, Apple has also positioned the Watch as a replacement for the fitness bands. By default it does remind you to move, exercise, and stand (although sometimes reminding me to stand right after I've sat down after a long walk); and it does include a variety of exercise-tracking tools. In addition, it monitors your heart rate regularly, which is interesting. But if I was really into fitness, I'd find these applications to be a bit weak; and I might look for a device that monitors heart rate constantly, that I could use to track my sleep, or that had built-in GPS for running without carrying a phone. There's no perfect fitness device yet; everything has its trade-offs.

I'm quite happy with many of the other built-in applications. Apple Maps can show you the directions on your wrist, which I have found surprisingly convenient (even though I still have some issues with Apple Maps itself as an application). It shows you the weather where you are, and picked up new locations well as I traveled. It also offers a nice way to control your music.

It took a little effort to set up Apple Pay, but once set you can hold your watch next to a payment terminal and press the button twice—something that worked well. It's not that hard to pull out your smartphone—or even a credit card from your wallet for that matter—but it is more convenient not to have to do it.

The biggest surprise may be Siri, the voice-controlled agent, which you get to by holding down the digital crown. Siri has improved markedly through the years, and now does a pretty good job of controlling your music, getting you directions (via Apple Maps), and giving you answers to many questions (such as the weather). If it doesn't know the answer directly, it will offer to search the Web, but for Web results, you'll have to go back to the phone. Not perfect, but still surprisingly good.

I've tried a few third-party applications that worked well, including those from American Airlines (which even displayed the boarding pass QR code on the watch) and The Score, which sends updates to the phone whenever one of my favorite teams scores.

More applications are appearing for the phone regularly: I can get notifications from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Open Table, and Uber, for instance. But it's still early days for many of these apps. I'd like more iPhone apps to have Watch counterparts, and I often would like more control over exactly what appears on the watch as opposed to the phone. As I said when I first saw the watch back in September, apps will be the key to the success of the Apple Watch platform, and this is still an area that is very much in progress.

So overall, it's a good start, though it does still feel like a first-generation product. I expect that both Apple's software and third-party applications will improve over time—after all, recall that the first iPhone didn't even have an App Store.

Is the Apple Watch a must have? No. For the money (anywhere from $349 to over $10,000 depending on material and band), you can get a nice watch that you could wear for many years, and I don't expect the same will be true of the Apple Watch. Inevitably, there will be hardware updates that will make this first version look old within a couple of years. But if you want the convenience of a smartwatch, and are willing to charge it every night, the first version is quite functional and very nice to live with. And it will only improve.

For more, check out PCMag's review.