I have now hit the two week point with my Apple Watch. I shared my thoughts after a week, and wanted to update you on what else I have encountered with an Apple Watch Review – week 2.
Some good stuff
The watch continues to do a great job at numerous things, among them:
- I used a Golf app (FunGolf) and played a round. For the first 2 holes it gave a glimpse at the possibilities of using a watch for such an activity. I was able to leave my phone in the cart or in my pocket and just glance at the watch for distance to the green. Then it stopped working. I contacted tech support for FunGolf and they said they had a known bug, but are releasing an update. I will try that again.
- I did a phone call while on the course with our project manager, and at the end of the call I asked him how the quality of the call was, my voice, etc. and he said it was good. Up to that point, he had no idea I was in a cart.
- The navigation works very well. I tried two things:
- Asking Siri on the watch for directions to a nearby church: no problem and gave me directions quickly.
- Setting a destination on the phone and since the watch was connected, I kept getting little wrist taps and an indicator to turn left, right, etc. When I parked the car and started walking, the navigation switched from driving to walking directions automatically, and as I walked the 2 blocks with a turn, the watch led me right to the restaurant for lunch.
- I paired a blue tooth stereo ear bud set (Jaybird Bluebuds X) to the watch to test using local music and other functions. The music sounds great as expected, but music controls are limited to play/pause, previous song, and next song.
- Continue to track my activity. I used the workout mode for a long walk on Saturday, and it dutifully recorded more info. I think it used more battery during this period, and I am not sure I see an advantage, as it is always tracking activity anyway, but I will try it again.
Some not so good stuff
In the not so good category, I was surprised by the following things.
- There seems to be no way to start a call on the watch using a paired blue tooth headset. I can answer a call that way, but not initiate one.
- The ear bud controls do not work the same as on the iPhone or iPad. On those devices I can double tap the middle button on the ear buds and go to the next song, three taps for back, etc. That just wants to do a redial when connected to the watch. I will play some more with that, but so far I am disappointed. In fact the overall value of Bluetooth ear buds is pretty low with these limitations.
- Third party applications seem slow and buggy so far. The golf app, a small bible verse app, and Cyclemeter are slow to load and slow to respond when compared to Apple native apps like calendar, etc. This may be due to developers having limited exposure to the actual hardware, so I hope that gets better quickly.
Overall I still think it a good – very good purchase. One thing I realized when considering the value: it is a watch. That seems obvious, but consider what we expect of watches – we glance at them and get a tidbit of info, and move on to daily life. The Apple Watch just gives me more to glance at, and I find that helpful.