I've had an Apple watch for about a month now, so I thought I'd share my thoughts, on it in particular, and on smart watches in general.
Why did I buy the apple watch? I wasn't buying a new smartphone this year for a change, but saw from Apple's entry into the bluetooth headphone market, that the remote was a thing of the past, and thing to fill that gap would be a watch. So if the new ecosystem was going to be one with a watch, I wanted to buy it in this off year, to make next year cheaper, and to be a position where I could make a better judgment about the proposed ecosystem. I also kind of think that health trackers of some sort are the future, so might as well, jump in.
I probably don't use the apple watch typically. I'm not an alert fiend or a workout hound. I sleep with the watch on and have it on for most of the day. It frequently gets some time off (and charging) right after I get home, and again while I shower in the morning. And with this routine, and with rise to wake off, I don't have problems with the watches battery life.
I think where the watch really shines for me is as a digital watch. It's probably the best I've owned. It's alarms with it's taptic engine are nice and discrete. It's easy to have many of them and to set them up in same-complicated fashions. It's replaced my iPhone for most of my alarms. It's timers are also good. And it's generally more convenient to get to then my phone for the time. I don't think that any watch has lasted on my wrist so long.
It's a fitness tracker, but I don't watch that that much. I'm not trying to use it for that much. My curiosity about such things is fed by it. I think that it's a good supplement to my phone. And it meets my idle curiosity. But a large part of my interest in this function stems from the death of my mother. She died alone and her last hours are a mystery to us. We used some of the tracking in her phone to shape up that period. But a watch that's almost always on me will, I imagine do a better job.
I haven't gotten to use it as a remote yet. I can but it's somewhat silly since I'm not using bluetooth headphones. Even when I do, then model I think is most compelling has an on wire remote. So we'll see if this use pans out. maybe I'll be able to do enough or maybe it'll be slower for all the things the on cable remote can do, but too awkward to do the more complicated stuff.
While my phone is a device I spend a lot of time staring at I think the watch is a device for glancing at. I really like the intimate notifications of it tapping me. and using it for apple pay can go either way depending on the terminal location. For health monitoring and discreet notifications, and maybe as remote for things on less accessible objects. Overall I think that it's a plus. If you're not sure, I'd consider waiting until series 3, comes out and you can potentially get a used series 2, on the cheap.
I think there is a future for wearables. I imagine in the future, I'll wear headphones that work for all of my devices. have a watch for when I'm on the go and need to interact with something, and really only pull out my phone for entertainment/productivity, when I'm stopped somewhere for a while. I once thought that what we should have is a personal area network, that lives in a brick in our bag, and that can manage choosing between cell or wifi, and have lots of endpoints we can interact with. Now that's what we're getting but it's going to be our phone.
