![]() And that's why it's not only a threat to other smartwatches, but to mechanical watchmaking. One of its biggest secrets, though, is this: it shows every indication of having been made by people who love and understand watches, and who know that for any kind of wearable to succeed, it has to be love at first sight. I think the Apple Watch is winning the smartwatch wars right now for several reasons: better UI is one (I struggle to find Android Wear compelling, in any form, at least so far) and its ability to keep your phone in your pocket, and your head up, is another. Take Force Touch, for instance the UI really needs some sort of cue that clues you into when it can be used to access a function or change a setting or, absent that, you have to accept that there's a learning curve in figuring out when you're supposed to use it. And for all its polish, especially with the latest software update, it’s still clear there are problems left to be solved – one of the biggest gaps to fill, I think, is that with three possible control inputs, it’s not always clear which should be used when. Granted, Apple has a design development war chest that’s probably bigger than the entire annual earnings of every watch brand put together, and granted, they have people like Jony Ive and Marc Newson behind them. I can think of frighteningly few watches at any price, mechanical or quartz, that are as well designed. It's just one part of the most expensive Apple Watch outside of the gold Edition, and the whole watch costs $1,099. If that bracelet had been designed in Switzerland it would probably have added four figures to the cost of the watch it came on, and I'm not sure that there is a watch brand in Switzerland with the imagination to design something like this right now. In dismissing the Apple Watch – or in rushing to market with poorly thought out, or obviously overpriced and cynically designed smartwatches – I think the Swiss watch industry is missing something, which is that Cupertino may understand luxury better than Europe right now. It's a very nifty feature in itself, but it also shows the kind of attention to detail that luxury should be about. It would certainly feel more native to a mobile touch experience than the tabbed system in iOS Safari, and the tile system for organizing apps in general, which by comparison with the Apple Watch now feels restrictive. The iPhone’s navigation system feels, by comparison, still rooted in a desktop paradigm, including the browser experience, and I wonder whether or not the app navigation system in the Apple Watch wouldn’t make a great basis for a mobile browser. You’d have thought Apple would go with the tile-based design the iPhone uses, but in fact, the Watch app navigation system makes a lot more sense it’s a better use of screen real estate and I found it a lot more engaging than the design for the iPhone. The icons roll in any direction you swipe, as if they’re on the surface of an invisible sphere as the icons roll to the center position, they’re magnified. Each app has a circular icon, and the overview of all the apps is in the form of a circular cluster you navigate with finger swipes. How long the whole process takes depends on whether or not you choose to upload any Watch compatible apps from your phone onto your Watch, but all in all, it took less than ten minutes from the moment I turned on the Watch to actually wearing it.Īpps are represented in an interesting way. You’ll then be asked if you want to do things like set up a credit card for Apple Pay, set up the Activity app, and match settings on your iPhone (the Apple Watch mirrors privacy settings on your iPhone, which is more than just a nice touch it helps keep the whole experience from becoming confusing and overwhelming you can also manage privacy in each app individually). (In fact, it’s so much fun to watch I wish Apple offered it as an optional watch face.) Center the image in a frame shown in the Watch app and you’re paired automatically. The watch displays a swirling globular particle cloud – it’s not anything in particular but it looks like it could be an abstract representation of a lot of things: flocking starlings schooling plankton a neural network a star cluster sped up so that every second represents a billion years a concept-art study for the sentient planet Solaris in the Stanislaw Lem novel of the same name. This is a lot of fun (maybe the first time in the history of Bluetooth someone’s managed to make device pairing fun).
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