I am a watch guy. Whatever I’ve done in my crazy life I almost always would be wearing some kind of timepiece. I am unashamed to say I wore a Casio calculator watch in the 80s way, way past when it stopped being cool. If it ever was. This is quite a bit different than that, yet also similar.
Until this past week I had been wearing a Timex Iron Man, because being an out-of-shape nerd with an athelete’s watch is just how I roll. Apple Watch can do stopwatch and all the other functions that my Timex does. Plus I can now track my heart-rate while thinking about exercising, too.
When I opened the Apple Watch, configured it, and slapped it on I immediately could tell this could be a hit with people like me who hate phone-notifications. I keep my notifications all on silent, except for the “VIP” group feature that was introduced in iOS 7. Senders in that group (friends, family, etc) will make a noise or otherwise indicate new mail or text, while the rest of filthy humanity has to wait until I review my mail (exception: work mail, I’m probably glancing at that inbox every half hour or so).
The Apple Watch can take all those silent notifications, if properly configured, and allow you to review and clear them them with a simple “force touch”. The watch is otherwise chatty out of the box, with quite a few notifications enabled by default. Once you turn all that junk off, and configure the alerts with intent (which ones are important, which aren’t) the watch is a lot more useful.
I’m not seeing the problem with battery-life all the tech bloggers are concerned about, but I know this probably won’t make it 2 whole days before going into “Power Reserve” mode either. I didn’t think I would like it, but the screen does look good and cleaner than I thought it would. And I also like the overall look of the case. I usually prefer a round watch case, but this form-factor just makes sense to me the more I use it. So I really think Mr Ive & designers got it right.
I haven’t really done much else with the watch yet, so this isn’t really any kind of review. Just a first-impression after a week. But I have connected it to my Phillips Hue plain lights around the house. Kind of fun to control the lights from your wrist.
My only complaint, so far, is that there aren’t enough watch faces. The stock ones from Apple are really great-looking, so it’s easy to overlook this. But if Apple isn’t allowing third-party watch faces then I am hoping they come up with some more variety or offer more customization options. But all-in-all I like it so far, and I think it will be my main watch and notifications-gateway for some time to come.
Originally published at julianwest.me on May 1, 2015.