http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_ta...
Which is itself a reference to real-life results involving motion detection/computer vision/image processing (this was a particularly bad problem in the earlier days of the field, but still persists today to some extent).
But seriously, how could Apple not test this?
They do explicitly note that you may need an external heart rate sensor band in some conditions if the pulse oximeter isn't working for some reason.
All jokes aside (I can live with the downvotes), I could see this easily falling through the cracks for a company new to wearables. What about hairy arms? What about skinny arms?
Tim Cook has stated that the focus for iOS development through to version 9 and likely a release or two afterwards will be performance and stability. Only then if Apple can push the battery life a few extra hours will they likely open the platform up a bit more.
Fully agree with the author how amazing it is seeing so many buggy apps after having a week to play with my watch. Even from some of the established players e.g. getting quota exceeded errors using Twitter.
I still think people just don't wear watches will cause watches to be a very minimal form of wearables.
I seriously would wear a bracelet that had a larger usable surface and longer battery life and faster cpu :)
In terms of lock-in strategies, iCloud Photo Library feels a lot more powerful to me. Can't wait to see if Apple can get their services fixed in the long term :)
Then Will.i.am would like to sell you a smart cuff/bracelet thingy:
Sadly, despite being huge, it gets worse life than an Apple Watch, even if you don't use it as a cell phone.
Once we had a watch we discovered tons of bugs that didn't show up before.
I totally missed this limitation until now. So the iWatch works only if you have an iPhone and the phone is in communication range with the watch?
What can the watch still do if the phone is offline or too far away?
I believe the watch face continues to work but anything that requires interacting with non-native apps (most of apple's apps are native on the watch fyi) or network connectivity just won't work. On the plus side it will work with bluetooth and wifi so you can at least go some [minor] distance away from your watch. But this same limitation exists in Android Wear and Pebble as well (though Pebble has native applications so less of an issue there).
I never gave them much thought until just now, but learning that really saps some of the novelty away from the whole thing for me.
I can't imagine a good reason to own a watch in 2015 and learning they're only functional when paired with a phone reinforces that belief.
This is not true. Both pebble and androidwear allow developers to write native applications that run directly on the watch, and can continue operating without the tether to a phone. Without the phone they have no network connection which limits their potential a lot, but they can still access the sensors on the watch, record data, and provide interactions based on stored and sensor data.
Maybe rev. 2.
Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not block the functionality.
>Can I access the users Heart Rate? No.
This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be a priority. This works on AW right now.
This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want AW and Pebble to continue being the only smartwatch game in town. This seems to fall into the Apple conventional wisdom of, "New product? Wait until Rev A." AW isn't perfect but its kind of what I expect for a smartwatch platform. Its lightweight and somewhat of an accessory to your smartphone (not another app/ad platform), but still feature rich and developer friendly.
But I can't say I'm not entirely surprised. Apple doesn't like people customizing the look of their products much. Look at the iPhone (which I own) it's still a grid of icons; no live information at all like every single other platform out there unless you want to dig into a draw and slide over to today.
But yes, overall I agree. It's a bit surprising just how locked down it is. Especially when it's hard to see the gain from it. The Apple Watch seems to have a shorter (or at least not longer) battery life than most of the Android Wear models that allow taxing the watch battery to do quite a lot more stuff.
Apple is almost always conservative with the feature set of software shipping on first-generation devices. Maybe they learned an important lesson in the 1990s about the dangers of not building on a solid foundation.
In time, Apple may change this and allow them. But with exposed functionality, start with a minimum viable product. What you add you can't easily remove.
In Apple's eyes, it's Android and Pebble who are rushing :)
What annoys me in reading consumer-facing reviews of the product is how much of the perceived potential is through things that should be done by software...for example, the ability to filter notifications from the phone...there's no reason why a second (or third, fourth, etc) layer of notification triage can't be implemented as a phone setting...in fact, I think iPhone's Do Not Disturb mode is fantastically better done than its Android equivalent. But to think that the Watch, or any ancillary device, is needed to inherently solve the problem of filtering information overload...it's as if rather than developing better spam filters, email providers just encouraged consumers to make multiple email accounts to handle the deluge.
So hopefully Apple increasingly opens up the API for developers, to do things far beyond what Apple has anticipated in its marketing plan.
Right now I get wrist notifications maybe 5-10 times a day. E.g, my next meeting, a text message. I can sneak a glance in during a meeting and then either carry on or smoothly bring things to an end so I can deal with something urgent. That's about what I want; anything else can wait until I'm free, at which point I'll pull out my phone and skim the non-urgent stuff that has stacked up.
Despite having poked at the SDK, and despite having built a personal-use Android app in the meantime, I haven't really had the urge to build anything for the Pebble. I don't want more on my wrist.
For certain occasions like doing outdoor sport, an inbuilt low-power 2G phone modem would be awesome, so that one can use it without a smartphone in the pocket. One can also imagine an improved Siri app. Both combined with a improved battery that lasts 2+ days would be an instant buy.
I think in practice some of your guesses about notifications and interruption are proving wrong for most people because of the phenomenology of the Taptic engine.
In terms of text messages: I guess it's hard to think of a situation in which the ability to glance at my wrist instead of investigating the vibration in my pocket is a huge advantage. Text messages can sometimes be important, but if I'm expecting a text message in a given time period, I'll put myself in a situation in which having the phone out is not a problem (i.e. not be in a movie theater).
I guess one situation in which having a watch is better than a phone: when you're moving around in such a way that you don't notice/hear the phone going off. I've missed calls that way. But I guess I'm not in that situation enough to justify a new device...I mean, that's helpful, but we're not yet that far removed from a time when we had to arrange our rendezvous and appointments with no expectation that we could contact people in mid-transit (i.e. before cell phones).
I don't consider myself a huge Luddite. I waited in line for the first iPad, but with that, I felt the value proposition was obvious: this is a computer you can walk around with in one hand and read/navigate/etc....even just reading from a tablet is obviously appealing, in the way that reading a physical book/magazine/newspaper is more appealing (despite limitations) than from a laptop or desktop. The value of iPods and iPhones was never hard to figure out either, even if you doubted whether or not they were worth the price over their competitors.
The exclusion of ads from the Watch could (wild speculation here) point to a future without ads in the Apple ecosystem. Ads are typically obnoxious, tolerated only because the host app is free. Given their very un-Apple-like feel, maybe there's a plan to wean them out of the walled garden.
Paid apps as a monetization strategy has failed. Advertising I think is failing too.
Free with in-app purchase is making a lot of money but people don't like it.
This is a big challenge for apple.
Advertising models like this (contextual notification powered offers) must exist for smartphones already - anyone know the leader in this segment?
My concern is only modestly with privacy; it's more about intimacy. Defending against manipulation requires a bit of space, a bit of distance from the manipulator. There is zero chance I would let ads on my watch, a surface I paid a fair bit of money for because there's some information so useful that I basically want it to be part of my body.
Yes, you can: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/toolbox-for-apple-watch/id98... or https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flip-coin-coin-flip-decision... for example. Pretty amazing that apps like those two got the green light from the App Store Review Team.
Though I really don't see how the first one, with an iPhone app that is just a blank screen, got through.
I recall a high-ranking individual (Jobs, Cook, or Forstall) from Apple saying this a couple of years ago, but I don't remember when, where, or context. Sorry.
I referee soccer. This means that some number of times a year, I regularly get paid for an activity where a wristwatch is my only piece of tech and I rely on it while breathing heavily and making spectators, team officials and players express their unhappiness. I have half a dozen wristwatches in my referee bag. When I run center, I accumulate wristwatch-wearing-hours two at a time because I have to get things right. No amount of software sophistication can overcome the ergonomics of wristwatches.
The wristwatch form factor has poor ergonomics for an interactive device because it always requires two hands. Placing a small machine on the wrist puts it out of harms way by placing it behind our primary method for interacting with the physical world. Wristwatches work ergonomically because they require limited manipulation and are primarily displays.
To the degree wristwatches offer interaction, quick interactions are done by feel. Timex's Ironman series performs its intended function well because the lap button is easy to locate without looking. However, basic wristwatch ergonomics mean that hitting that button is two handed and slows down a runner. Even worse, bringing an arm across the chest briefly inhibits full expansion of the chest and thus lung capacity. Only because the information the watch provides is so valuable is such a biomechanical cost a viable engineering tradeoff.
Running a wristwatch off a phone turns two-handed one-device operations into potential two-or-three-handed two-device operations. Sure, the obvious solution is a voice interface...but when everything runs on the phone, then a wristwatch is just a bluetooth microphone with a small display...with wrist mounted microphone versus headset mounted.
On the other hand, The wrist is a well protected place for mounting sensitive equipment on the body and the wristwatch is a reasonable form factor for sensors, yet in the long run serious sensor platforms want to be open as do the platforms for analysis of sensor data. Proprietary interfaces are not likely to be the direct road to the quantified self.
(As opposed to a consumers' view of what you can do with it.)
However, development for the Time so far hasn't been as easy as I'd thought, e.g. some of the examples provided to develop watch-faces, etc. online didn't seem to be fully up-to-date to use with color/Time.
Apple's rollout strategy makes sense here. Restrict the number of ways developers can kill the battery, because it's the Watch people will blame, not the poorly engineered apps.
Kudos to Apple's marketing abilities for pimping it as a luxury thing (I wouldn't even call it a watch. Wearable perhaps?) and making people to salivate over it.
Apple's marketing is something worth paying for to learn from.
