1. More is a one way street.
Apple’s greatest offense here is calling it a watch. It is only as much of a watch as the iPhone is a phone. One of the first upshots I noticed in daily life was the pity I felt towards other watches. “It only tells the time?” Or, worse, I saw a friend’s $300 Garmin watch over the weekend and thought “But, well, for just another $50 you could’ve had…this.” Sure there will be a long and lovely market for timepieces. But the Apple Watch is the true dawn of wearable computing and people will be expecting more. Luxury watchmakers are beginning to embrace this reality — but the results of oldsters venturing into youngsters’ spaces is, well, complicated.
2. My first wearable™.
This is my first wearable. And probably my last. And that’s because it’s pretty damn good. Why would I use any other wearable exactly? I fear for the Fitbits of the world — the Apple Watch won’t send them immediately to the purgatory of Flip Cameras but fully popularizing the category might. As many have noted, Apple didn’t invent the categories it owns — in fact it didn’t invent any of them, from the user-friendly GUI to the iPad or the Apple Watch. Early critics of the iPod wondered aloud why we would need any successor to Sony’s MP3 players (then the heir apparents to the category-creating Walkman). As a long-time Blackberry lover I, like many, didn’t get an iPhone until many years after iPhone launch. Given time I’m certain the Apple Watch will be viewed the same way: category-creating best-of-class.
3. A tsunami of little victories.
My phone is perfectly capable of many things, yet these little actions were also fun and unusually satisfying on the watch:
- Answering a call!
- Accepting a meeting request!
- Discreetly viewing incoming messages!
- Calendar alerts!
- Timing dinner!
- Sports scores!
- Amazon voice search!
- (Hate to say it but) Ubering!
- Mapping my run!
All handled with phone in pocket or in some other room. And I can honestly say that in not going to the phone for these events I was thoroughly less distracted from what I was doing at the time. When was the last time you opened a browser and went to just one site? Or went to your phone and touched just one app?
4. A tide pool of defeats.
There’s not too much that I flat out don’t like about the Apple Watch and, by and large, the pros outweigh the cons IMHO. (If you’re looking for a haters piece I assume you’ve stopped reading already.) To be honest it’s a much, much better first generation Apple product than I expected — hardware and software both. But the niggling things? Yeah I’ve got a few complaints:
The app load times are a bit absurd. It’s not unusual to wait 4+ seconds or more for apps to load or load data. I get it: it’s tethered to the phone and bluetooth is bluetooth, but this is, I would say, the primary gap between the watch and the phone experience.
I admit it: I had to Google a few instructions, like how to change the watch face. Yeah, Apple included a very nicely designed quick start guide that I totally ignored. Also still not sure how to draw the heart and send it either…
Like many iPhone users, I love Apple hardware with Google software. On the watch in particular this means bending to Apple Maps instead of Waze or Google Maps, which is a shame. I assume the Google Apps will come and, thankfully, Outlook (by far the best iPhone email client) works perfectly on the watch.
5. The haptics are intimate.
Truly. They are. No bing, no buzz. Little vibrations. Only you know. I don’t understand the language they’re speaking yet, but in time I’ll learn. I’m sort of trying not to research what they mean and just learn by listening or, rather, feel. The meaning: it’s a very, very personal device. Nobody else can see the face. It only reveals its knowledge to the owner. And after 5 days I’m beginning to learn the secret language. Like!
6. The art of the notification.
One of the first things you must complete during set-up is to choose which apps will send notifications to the watch. First, it’s genius that Apple made this a part of the set-up process. It would’ve been very easy to not do this and simply assume that all notifications on phone would be mirrored on watch. And that would’ve been a grave error. Given the intimacy of the notifications, you must choose. I believe the intimacy of the watch will sharpen users’ senses about notifications, which will in turn require developers to be more conscious of them and, ideally, offer more granular options.
They’d be wise to to look to sports apps, which already do this very well. For a single hockey game The Score allows me to choose specific notifications for any or all of these events: game start, game end, period end, close game, all power plays and all goals. It also remembers my selections from previous games. And that’s just the beginning of how users can customize notifications in The Score. Sports fans — many of whom are DVRing events for viewing later — require this control and the developers have delivered. The art of the notification will need to be learned more widely.
7. Context is king.
Woe be unto the brand that abuses watch notifications! I’m fairly forgiving of irrelevant messaging on my phone, but I won’t enjoy it on the watch. Not one bit. Ergo, people will curate their notifications more carefully and brands will be responsible for ensuring their messages are more contextually relevant than ever before. With the app mentioned above, I have to make very conscious choices for which notifications I want to receive. That’s messaging 1.0. Messaging 2.0 will need to be smarter — basing messaging on my place, time, habits and other learned data.
Fortunately there are emerging technologies to enable this evolution — among them beacons and other proximity and shopper marketing tools, as well as advanced CRM technology — all designed to do what marketing has always done: right place, right time, right message. If you want to play on wearables, you better get all three of those right, and then some.
8. A humble beginning.
Most of the apps are not all that impressive…yet. It feels like the first wave of apps were created by brands/designers/developers who a) wanted to get their Apple Watch app out in the first wave, to say that they did, and b) did not have a device in their hands. Simply put — I’m not seeing very many apps that are offering the right mix of not too much and not too little information. Forgiven: it’s a new medium. The trick is going to be getting this mix right, and I’m excited to see the developers rise to the challenge of this new space.
9. Read only.
The Apple Watch is mostly read only. Yeah, you can write in some ways in some places but it’s just not for that. And there’s some beauty there: you can stay on top of incoming information without being completely sucked into it. I would argue, strongly, that it’s helped me to be more in the moment, not less, simply because the immediate options are fewer. In this way it truly is an optional device akin to a Kindle or iPad, and not a total must-have. Like these non-essential devices, it will end up having a much longer refresh cycle than phones. Maybe that’s mixed news for AAPL stock holders, but it’s good news for consumers, who won’t want to feel pressured into upgrading an unsubsidized device very often.
10. Serious business.
In a great article on the impact of Apple Watch on businesses, Matt Dion of e-commerce provider Elastic Path gets the place of the Apple Watch very right:
“When you look at the Apple Watch as a missing link of omnichannel commerce (because it allows the digital form of a customer’s identity, preferences, and behavior to combine with their physical context to provide natural forms of guidance, utility and value) you can see that the businesses that will benefit most from this shift will be omnichannel retailers, transportation, travel, hospitality, live entertainment providers — basically, any enterprise with a physical component.”
Truth! I work heavily in retail innovation and experience design and my company,The Science Project, works with many retailers to create digitally-enhanced store and real world experiences. Retailers tell me two things all the time: “I definitely want my stores to be enhanced by digital experiences” and also “I don’t want my customers looking at their phones in my stores!” Enter Apple Watch and a new field of possibility. I’m very, very excited to work and play in this space and I believe the Apple Watch will become a key to unlocking customer value in the stores of the future.
Finally…
I can see on the interwebs many people asking for MORE MORE MORE from the Apple Watch — “It’s not a killer device! It’s not a must have!” I would propose that they are right. It’s not a killer device. It’s a gamechanger. And like the great unorthodox gamechangers in sport — Gretzky, Orr, Jordan, Robinson — the full impact will be revealed over time. It’s the same with technology and always has been. Long live the Apple Watch.
out of 5 stars
Reviewer:Sajid -
March 29, 2012
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