Why a Die-Hard Mechanical Watch Lover Can't Get the Apple Watch Off His Wrist
hodinkee.comI am the opposite. I am looking to switch back to a mechanical watch. Frankly the Apple Watch is a disaster in terms of product management. It offers too much useless functionality e.g. apps (ridiculously slow), the important functionality is crippled e.g. Health and areas are poorly designed e.g. complications.
And after the year of having it I have all this Activity/Health data and wondering what the point of it is. I can't use it for anything.
Unless Apple has something magical up their sleeve to dramatically improve the performance of iOS I don't understand why they bothered to bring full blown apps across. It's always going to be too slow to be useful.
>> "And after the year of having it I have all this Activity/Health data and wondering what the point of it is. I can't use it for anything."
This data has been very useful for me. It's not saving my life or effecting my medical care but it has helped me lose weight consistently for the first time in my adult life. I started losing weight slowly last year and managed to continue that trend. I owned the Apple watch for about 4 months before selling it as I didn't like being 'connected' all the time. Looking back at the data recently though I noticed that during those Apple Watch months I lost weight at a much more rapid rate. I believe this is because of the motivational aspect of the 'activity' app. I enjoyed trying to meet my daily goals and increasing those every few weeks. I noticed things slowed down again after I sold the Watch. I recently purchased it again to see if I could repeat that impact. For someone like myself who seriously lacks motivation this kind of tracking is incredibly valuable.
I suspect at some point in the future smart watches will become useful and the masses will adopt them.
But right now, they're just over-expensive toys. When I can buy a 15m water proof rated Google Wear watch that has a week or more battery life for $99, then they'll be ready for mass adoption.
Until then, notsomuch.
You're probably looking for one of the newer Pebbles then.
The Pebble Time Steel can last up to 10 days with average use and the regular Pebble Time up to a week.
Pebble Time Round only lasts two days and the older Pebbles are prone to hardware failures so I wouldn't recommend them.
See, that's the thing. I like the Pebbles. I like where that product line is going. I think they're maybe the only one of two product lines going in the right direction (and the other of the two isn't Google Wear or iWatch).
However, every single goddamned service provider out there just ignores them as if it's just some silly geek toy. No one wants to do first party support on them for apps. Now, I'm not saying there isn't quite a few high profile service providers, but it seems to be all the wrong ones:
* Yelp: Why? Yelp on my phone exists to upload photos to help local businesses (I'm doing my part!), I can't imagine I'm going to need Yelp on my watch
* Runkeeper: sure, but if I'm running without my phone, I'd want something that does its own GPS like Garmin's stuff; and not only that, Runkeeper, the company, is starting to veer into hyper-annoying "please upgrade" messages all the time, so I'm going to personally going to drop them and switch to Strava or Runtastic or w/e
* Evernote: I don't see the point of this either, sometimes even using it on my phone is just too small of an interface to do anything but read. Plus, I'm switching to OneNote for the better desktop AND phone experience (and it has Google Wear and I think MS Band support now) (and OneNote on a phone seems usable for both read and write, unlike Evernote)
* A bunch of radio and music services I don't subscribe to: Google Music is the defacto service on Android, iTunes on iOS. I don't expect iTunes support (hell, Apple tried to ban apps that offer Pebble support because Pebble competes with the iWatch), but I expect Google Music support, and if not that, Plex support. Give me something that already has access to my personal music library.
* Uber: Generally, Uber drivers want to call you, thus you generally need to whip out your phone anyways. I'm not sure if Pebble has a Lyft app too, but my experiences with Lyft have been better (because Lyft treats their drivers better), and what I said also applies to Lyft, in my experience. * Todo systems that aren't Todoist: Sorry, Todoist is probably the least idiotic system out there, without that, well, I just won't be doing task management on a watch then.
What damns them in the end, even given the weird selection of app partners they advertise on the Pebble website? The lack of a full sensor suite.
Now, all of that said, if apps aren't going to be the ones I'd want to use (because literally everyone has this problem, every single watch ecosystem, there's always that one app/service you use and it just isn't on the watch you're looking at, every single person has this problem right now), and Pebble's app experience in general seems to be not quite what I want either...
I'd like to remind people that the Microsoft Band 2 exists. If I had to be forced to buy a smart watch today, that'd be that one. However, it damns itself on the lack of battery life and the lack of sufficient water resistance, but it has the physical size and weight and user experience all figured out perfectly, and it has partnered with all the major service providers like Google and Apple have for their ecosystems.
So, yeah, personally, I feel smart watches just aren't there yet. If battery tech keeps getting denser and denser at the rate it is now, I suspect in about 5 years I'll get the watch I want, either from Pebble or Microsoft Band (and I feel both of those product lines will still exist then, too; neither of them feel like they're going to get Google Glassed anytime soon).
Lost me after the long praise for the packaging (which I consider irrelevant) at:
"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."
Excuse my cynicism, but I'm here to read informative reviews/analysis, insightful ideas, rather than look at gorgeous</s> photos of black technology set to wood textures and read this syrupy poetry. :-/
Maybe he glued it on by accident.
...I hate all the titles on here lately.
A very click-baity article that's getting a lot of coverage from the usual pro-Apple websites