After months of deciding did I or did I not want one, I finally made the plunge in January 2016 as I had a bit of money left over from Christmas and also Apple had a good deal on via PayPal credit which was 0% interest for 12 months.
I think its best to start off with why I wanted one. I wanted it for a few of its features, the fact it could give me notifications on my wrist rather than getting my phone out every 5 minutes at work because it was going off (I get a lot of rubbish tele sales calls due to my business), it would allow me to track my day to day activity via the fitness tracker which I thought would be good to know and finally anyone who knows me knows I love watches so it felt like the ideal thing for me to buy as it was the closest thing to replicating a watch. Also the reason I went for the sport watch rather than the other two options is because it was going to be mainly for use at work so it would get bashed about a lot.
So how easy and straight forward is it to set up? For anyone asking or have asked me YES you do need an iPhone and it needs to be an iPhone 5 upwards, once you get it out of its packaging you need to connect the watch to the charger mains and then use the app (that is pre downloaded if you have upgraded to iOS 8) on your iPhone. It is then a simple to follow guide to set up your Apple Watch asking you various questions such as what do you want to sync and what wrist are you going to use your watch one.
So you have read the reason behind wanting one but in reality how well does it work for me? To be honest I do have a love-hate relationship with it. I Love that it has a very sleek and lightweight design and is comfortable to wear, it is very easy to use (like most apple products) and it is very easy to set up. It deals with the job of notifications and phone calls which is very convenient for me in my day to day job but my one criticism on this topic is that it doesn’t handle emails as well as I expected as it only shows a preview of that email and when you click on the preview it then shows a message to view the rest of the email on your iPhone, which kind of defeats the object of the whole email function surely? The fitness tracker is a very good feature and very responsive, it tracks three main things which are Movement, Exercise and Standing Time. It also counts active calories, total steps and distance traveled that day which are the main things I look at. Apple have also added a feature that gives you virtual badges for when you have achieved certain goals which does spur you on to try and be more active but the novelty does ware off over time and other features within this include when you have been sitting for to long, you get a slight vibration to remind you to get up and have a move around.
Like I said at the start it isn’t all good and it isn’t the perfect wearable device just yet. My biggest and by far most annoying reason for disliking the Apple Watch ever so slightly is the use of apps on the device. It is very slow at loading all third party applications along with some of the built in apps and just doesn’t seem up to speed with Apple devices as we know them. There is even occasions where an app won’t load at all and just crashes then takes you back to your home screen which is very frustration considering the cost of this device. Hopefully this is a fix that will come in time via an update as it is a software related problem and just needs to be optimized better but it does make you question why hasn’t this be done prior to release and why has this not been fixed considering its been out for nearly a year.
As a conclusion, It is a good device and has a great potential but it’s not a brilliant device considering the cost of it to start with (£339 but has recently been reduced by £50). Considering that there are a lot of other wearable watch tech devices I would probably be more inclined to get one of these lower costing devices until Apple sort out the software issue’s. If you are getting this device for tracking fitness and having it as a general watch my advice would be to go for something like a Fitbit HR (£99.99) or the new Fitbit Blaze (£159.99,which looks more like an Apple watch and traditional watch) along with the lower cost it is also not restricted to the one device so it can be used with Apple devices and Android based devices so it does not tie you down to one company.
Liams Tech Guide 