The Apple Watch Review
by Joshua Ho & Brandon Chester on July 20, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Wearables
- Apple
- Mobile
- Apple Watch
WatchOS: Time and Notifications
Ultimately, Apple Watch is a first generation product. As a result, details like the CPU, GPU, and RAM configurations are of secondary importance to software. Choices made early in the growth of a platform can have far-reaching consequences that will remain many years after the original hardware has long been obsolete. Android still uses the sdcard convention for user storage, even though many modern Android smartphones place the sdcard partition on internal storage as early Android smartphones strongly relied on microSD cards for user storage. iOS generally sees more issues with aspect ratio and density transitions than Android due to choices in UI rendering architecture, which were determined with the original iPhone. As a result, Watch OS 1 has to be a solid base for future growth, even if future iterations of Watch OS end up nothing like the original Watch OS.
Probably the first area worth discussing are watchfaces. One of the first things that became apparent to me in my experiences with Watch OS was that watchfaces have a great amount of depth when it comes to interactivity and customization. On other wearable platforms there are definitely applications that allow a pretty decent level of watchface customization in terms of appearance, but the equivalent of complications in Watch OS is usually missing to some extent. You might be able to see the weather, but you usually can’t display something else like battery percentage, sunset, calendar events, moon phases, activity progress, stocks, or any other information that you might be interested in seeing at a glance. It’s also possible to change the amount of detail you get when displaying the watch and use the digital crown to adjust the detail present analog faces. For example, the chronograph watchface allows you set 60, 30, 6, and 3 seconds for the timer. Other analog faces make it possible to set hours, minutes, and seconds of precision on the display. This might be a bit boring, but the included watchfaces show a solid framework for future growth.
It is a bit disappointing to see that there isn’t support for third party watchfaces out of the gate, but I suspect this is more due to a need to work out exactly what is needed for the API and the need to commit to long term support for any public-facing API. By comparison, it goes without saying that whatever private APIs Apple is using to enable the first-party watchfaces are subject to change at any time, which allows for significant latitude in how watchfaces are implemented.
Overall, the included watchfaces are also well-designed. It isn’t really possible to show with video, but the animations that are included are impressively executed. On analog watchfaces, the second hand moves smoothly with no apparent stutter, which is a nice touch even if this isn’t all that difficult for a general purpose computer with a display that can refresh at incredibly high rates as I’ve seen more than one smartwatch that will only update the second hand every second rather than in a seemingly continuous manner. I personally ended up using the modular watchface most of the time, which doesn’t have any analog motion, but something as simple as the breathing second indicator is subtle and well-executed.
Given that Apple Watch is supposed to be a timepiece first, there are other aspects of the watch worth discussing like the timer, alarm, and stopwatch UIs. Although this is seemingly small stuff, it’s really worth calling out the timer and alarm UIs as the best example of how the combined touch and digital crown navigation works in practice. There are large touch targets to select hours and minutes, and the digital crown allows for fast and precise selection within hours or minutes. The stopwatch UI is a great demo of Force Touch in action, as it’s possible to go from a simple analog or digital interface to a hybrid one, with a live graph of relative lap times instead of just a list of previous laptimes.
This is all really rather boring when you take a step back and realize that I’ve been talking about three of the most boring and bog-standard applications on any smartphone today, but when it comes to a first generation smartwatch it’s critical to get these applications done right. Of course, it goes without saying that alarms and timers work incredibly well on the Apple Watch due to the haptic feedback that is occurring on my wrist. Overall, on these simple aspects it's already pretty clear that Apple has put a pretty significant amount of thought into WatchOS. Probably the most obvious example of this is the ability to set the clock to be a set number minutes ahead, which is something that really shows attention to detail on Apple's part.
Outside of watchfaces, the next most important aspect of the Apple Watch is probably the notification system. When purely focused on the actual notification shade, the design doesn’t have any obvious flaws. If there are notifications in the drawer, a red dot appears on centered on the top of the display. Swiping down from the watchface opens up the notification drawer, with the ability to scroll through notifications with the digital crown and dismiss all notifications by using Force Touch providing a smooth and quick experience, although if you’re like me you might not realize that you can use Force Touch to dismiss all notifications for some time. However, in my experience with Watch OS 1 the experience is pretty bimodal when it comes to how useful these notifications are. The first case usually involves the ideal experience, which is an actionable notification that I can respond to on my wrist and dismiss after responding to it without ever taking out the phone to respond to the notification. Multiple simultaneous notifications are handled smoothly and logically. This is usually what happens with simple text messages/iMessage and other first-party applications.
The second case is usually what happens with third party applications, which tends to be a combination of poor handling of multiple notifications and no real actions that can be taken. Pretty much any third party IM client suffers from these issues right now, and probably the biggest source of notifications on my phone comes from third party IM clients. As a result, it’s really quite irritating to raise my wrist and see nothing but the application icon and a message saying that I have two notifications. In order to appropriately respond to this, the only solution at this time is for me to take out my phone, unlock it, and then read and type out my response on the phone. Alternatively, I have to dismiss the notification, then go back to the notification drawer and go through each notification separately.
To me, this represents a pretty significant issue that pretty much every wearable platform has right now, which is that there are often corner cases where wearables end up using more time than just using a smartphone alone. In the near term, I suspect the quickest solution to this issue is turning multiple notifications arriving simultaneously into a scrollable list instead of simply notifying that there are multiple notifications. It would also be helpful to be able to respond to notifications using dictation on the watch to draft a response, but I suspect that this requires additional work on the part of the developer to enable such things.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
270 Comments
View All Comments
name99 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Regarding ARMv7k, check out the following story:http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/09/support-for-q...
Note the date --- Sept 2011. Further evidence that Apple plans these things a LONG time in advance,
(Relative to which, it is interesting to note that over the past month there has been a flurry of activity by Apple people on working LLVM targeting M-class processors. Maybe Apple are planning more IoT peripherals in a few years, or maybe they want to stick a small MPU in every Beats headset for some reason?
Or maybe they are moving from whatever they use today for PMU and sensor fusion on iOS/Watch to an M-class core?)
hlovatt - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
First, thanks for a great review. Excellent to have such detail.I don't wear a watch so won't be getting one. However I know 4 owners who are all very happy. They all previously owned smart watches, Garmin, Pebble, Fitbiz, etc. and universally prefer the Apple Watch. The tap thing sounds like a gimmick, but just try it - it's really well done.
Gripe: If you hate Apple so much that you can't be rational just leave Anandtech. There are plenty of places were you can have a mutual we hate Apple session. You are spoiling the site for others who want to discuss tech. If you prefer some other product just buy it, don't sling insults at others that disagree with you. Get real the reviewers said they wouldn't recommend the 1st gen device and you go off saying they have sold out etc. Totally unfair to them.
name99 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
While investigating the CPU details in interesting (and thanks!!! for doing this) I think it's important to appreciate that the CPU is probably the least important thing about aWatch performance as it matters to the average person.There are IMHO three primary performance problems with aWatch today:
(a) There is far too little caching (in a very generic sense) so that third party apps (and some interactions with Apple apps) require communicating with iPhone. Much of this will disappear with WatchOS2; some of it may be an inevitable fact of life regarding how BT LE works and, in particular, the minimum possible latency when one side wants to talk to the other. But it's also possible that this latency could be reduced in future versions of BT by changing the rendezvous algorithm?
(b) The touch screen controller (I assume to save power) only seems to take initial sensor reading at around twice a second. The result is that the first time you touch the screen to scroll, there is an obvious halting until the system sort of "gets it" and starts smoothly scrolling. This is obviously a touch screen issue because using the digital crown (when that is feasible, so for vertical rather than horizontal scrolling) acts immediately and smoothly. The fix, presumably, is to ramp up the rate at which the touch screen controller does its initial sensing, but who knows what the power implications of that are.
(c) The heart rate sensor is on "full-time" (which means, I don't know, sensing once every 10 seconds?) when you are in the Workout app, but otherwise runs at a really low rate (once every ten minutes?) At least the way I use my aWatch, I'd prefer a higher rate.
I'm guessing that Apple was overly cautious about battery life in WatchOS1, and now that most people understand what to expect, and have about 40% battery at the end of the day, they can afford to bump up the sampling rates for all these different things (touch screen, heart rate, maybe even BT LE) and if that moves the battery life down to 20% battery at the end of the day, that's a pretty good tradeoff.
But nowhere in any of this is CPU performance actually an issue. I can't think of anywhere where CPU or GPU performance affect the experience.
name99 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
A few comments about fitness:The primary thing using the Workout app does, as far as I can tell, is switch to ongoing (rather than coarse) monitoring of heart rate and position, which is useful but not essential. However it DOES also give you a nice display of whatever you consider important. My Pebble used to kinda sorta track steps and thus calories, but the fact that the watch tracks and displays heart rate on the Workout app screen is actually really useful. With the Pebble I'd kinda slack off when doing a run or step climbing being that's only natural, but when your heart rate is displayed you have more incentive to keep pushing.
The workout app is also nice if you're trying to hit your calorie burn goal every day. If you get to say 10pm or so and are 150 calories short, you can set a calorie goal (rather than say a time goal or a distance goal) and then just start stepping while watching TV or whatever.
Two useful facts to know (which I don;t think you mention). You can launch Workout (or any app) through "Hey Siri launch workout" rather than navigating to the app screen. (It's also useful to know that Hey Siri as a way to start speech ONLY works when the screen is lit up. If you don't know this, it's maddening at first as half the time it seems to work and half the time it doesn't.
Also double-clicking the digital crown toggles between the most recent app and the watch face. I use it a lot to toggle between watch and workout.
Finally most readers are probably young and think the stand up stuff is dumb or pointless. It really isn't, at least for older people. I've got to the stage where, when I stand up I can feel a kind of stiffness in the muscles, you know that old person sigh when you get up. And I've found that since getting the watch and heeding the stand notices, that has pretty much disappeared --- it really does help older muscles to not get locked into no motion for two or more hours.
(Also if you find the standing irritating, it's worth noting that the watch wants you to stand for a full minute, with some motion. At first I just used to stand then pretty much immediately sit down. That's not good enough and it won;t give you credit for that. But if you stand and pace for a minute or so, it will always give a little ding and reward you with credit for the stand.)
The one thing I wish (there is so much we can all want them to add to WatchOS2 and then WatchOS3) is a data broadcast mechanism. In particular, if the workout data could be displayed simultaneously on a phone (placed near a TV or on a step machine control panel) that would be much more comfortable than having to flick the wrist every minute or so to check one's heartbeat. Oh well, in time...
navysandsquid - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
I've never seen such a butthurt bunch of people. Almost every review on the internet give the apple watch a favorable review. Maybe you guys should stop letting you hate consume you. Anandtech has done one of the most indepth review of the apple watch. Which they do with most products. If you don't like apple products don't read the reviews. Your pathetic for even comments such ignorant things like "Watch under 9 days of battery life is unacceptable" Like please name a watch device with this much capability that runs longer then a couple days. oh wait you cant. I've had the watch for about 2 months and this review is spot on weather you like apple or not. Anandtech is a good review site. So just look in the mirror and say "Why do I hate them so much" Let me answer that for you. You don't like paying for what you get. Wait let me rephrase that. you do like paying for what you get your just to cheap to pay for quality. so p1ss of and buy yours self a Samsung smart watch for 149$ and let it collect dust lol I'm donename99 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
"Glances are well-executed and a useful feature, but I don’t really get the point of integrating heart rate monitoring into a glance or similar cases of app information"The authors appear unaware that you can customize glances. Go to the Watch app on iPhone and look around. You can both hide glances you find unimportant, and rearrange those that you want to use. Once you've done this, you can basically prioritize so that the most important stuff is in complications, while second tier stuff lives in glances, and third tier stuff requires an app launch.
name99 - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
"Moving on to the saturation test, we can see that Apple has put a huge amount of effort into calibrating these displays, which is somewhat surprising given that one might expect wearables to not be all that critical when it comes to color accuracy."A persistent (and STILL not fixed) problem with the Apple ecosystem is that the faces of contacts display slightly differently on OSX vs iOS. There are outright bugs in the system (.psd photoshop files get incorrectly cropped on iOS, and different gamma is applied on OSX and iOS) but these may be fixed with the new Contacts framework of iOS9/OSX 10.11.
Point is --- your eye is actually remarkable sensitive to these apparently very slight deviations, at least when it comes to faces. So it makes sense for Apple to line up their hardware so that when they (at LONG FREAKING LAST!) get their software act together, the face photos do look identical across the line.
(And BTW how long will we have to keep typing in triples like iOS10/OSX 10.12/WatchOS3? At some point, and I think we're reaching that point, it's time to just refer to AppleOS 2015 followed by AppleOS 2016 followed by ...)
aryonoco - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
I am not an Apple hater, and I am very curious in the Apple Watch and the whole wearables category. However I agree with those who say that this review was below Anandtech's standards. Overly wordy, with too little information. I don't think I have ever said this about an Anandtech review before, but after reading this, I really don't think I learned a single thing that I didn't know going into the review.whiteiphoneproblems - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
Without wanting to "pile on," I agree that this review could have been 1/3 the length, and 3x as helpful. I usually look to AT for the "best" review of any mobile device, but I would not say that is the case with this particular review. Most other Apple Watch reviews I've read have been more useful. (I think it comes down to editing.)nrencoret - Monday, July 20, 2015 - link
+1 on that. I think you nailed the fact that Anandtech's succes is after reading an article, you always come out at the end a bit (or a lot in some cases) smarter. This review breaks the trend.