There
have been rumours and speculations surrounding the possible launch of
an "iWatch" for over an year now, and so when Tim Cook finally announced
the launch of Apple's smartwatch on Tuesday, it wasn't exactly a big
surprise. The actual details of the watch - a health and fitness focused
device - had largely been kept under wraps though, including its name.
If you're curious about Apple's latest offering, this is what you need to know:
1.
Its name - although the rumour mill had made up its mind that the watch
will be called the iWatch, Apple has gone for the somewhat uncreative
but highly functional name - Watch.
2. There are three collections
of designs available for the Apple Watch. First, you have the Watch,
which features materials like stainless steel and leather in the design,
the Watch Sport, which uses lightweight anodised and is designed to be
used more actively, and the Watch Edition, which is housed in a gold
body. This last is likely to be more expensive than the other designs.
3.
Across the three collections, there are a total of 18 different styles
of straps available, which means that you will be able to customise the
Apple Watch - both physically and in terms of software, to stand out
from others, but Apple hasn't given out details on the pricing of
different designs yet.
4. The Apple Watch home screen looks
familiar, but different from the iOS screens we're used to. Here, the
app icons are all shaped like round bubbles, and the screen are called
neighbourhoods. You pan across the "neighbourhood" with swipes, and then
zoom in until you can easily tap on the icon using the crown - which
Apple is calling the Digital Crown. This is an innovative solution to
the problem of navigation in a smartwatch, that doesn't rely only on
voice control.
5. It has a touchscreen, but you won't need to keep
touching the screen. On a small watch face, standard touchscreen
gestures are hard to use, and instead, the Apple Watch comes with a
crown on the side, of the kind that you have in traditional watches to
adjust the time with. Here, however, you use it to do things like
scrolling up and down a list, or zooming in and out of a map. At the
same time, you can still touch the screen if you need to.
6. You
can talk to your watch. Much like the Google Android Wear watches, the
Watch can also be
operated using voice commands. Pushing the crown
activates Siri, although Indian users at least might prefer Google for
this functionality - Siri has been fairly bad at recognising what some
members of the team are saying, while Google voice recognition has been
much more accurate.
7. You'll get feedback as vibrations. The
Apple Watch doesn't just talk back - instead Apple is going to use
different types of vibrations to reinforce its messages. What this means
is that one type of vibration could mean turn left, and another type of
vibration could mean turn right. Apple claims that this allows
navigation without looking at the screen.
8. Apple hasn't given
any details about battery life yet either. Charging the Watch is done
with a MagSafe cable connected to the back of the body, which sounds a
lot simpler than most of the other smartwatches in the market, which
still use complicated cradles to charge the watch. It's likely that the
watch will need to be charged every night, which isn't really great but
at least it's relatively easy to actually charge.
9. You need an
iPhone to use the Apple Watch. This shouldn't come as a surprise to
anyone, but the Apple Watch is dependent on your smartwatch for much its
data connection and functionality. It will work with the two year old
iPhone 5 onwards. Not surprisingly, it doesn't support other devices
such as Android.
10. It integrates a lot of health and fitness
functions. Trackers for heartbeat and activity are built into the watch,
and not only will it count your steps and track heartbeat, but it also
learns your behaviour and suggests fitness goals. That's one part of the
puzzle, but the iWatch also lets you carry out other functions thanks
to third party apps, so you're going to see apps from Nike and other
companies to take advantage of these new sensors as well.
11. The
Apple Pay functionality will be available on the Watch as well, so you
can just tap your wrist instead of pulling out your phone to make a
payment. Again, this feature is probably not so useful for readers in
India.
12. The Apple Watch starts at $349 - but we don't know how
much the different variants will cost. At that price, the Apple Watch is
definitely one of the most expensive smartwatches - the Sony Smartwatch
3 will be going on sale at the end of the year, priced at 230 EUR or
around $300. The other smartwatches all fall in a spectrum between this
(with the Moto 360 priced at $249.99) and the LG G Watch which just got a
$50 price cut down to $179.
13. Left-handed people needn't worry
about whether the Apple Watch will work for them, as Apple has confirmed
users will be able set the orientation of the watch's interface. THe
bands are also reversible, ensuring the smartwatch is not faced in the
wrong direction. Notably though, the Digital Crown will still be in an
inconvenient location - on the bottom left.
From what little we've
seen of the Apple Watch so far, it's a good looking device but it's not
the best looking one. What makes it interesting however is how
intuitive the interface design appears to be. The use of the crown for
controls is an obvious usage that has been crying out for attention but
Apple got there first despite being a full year behind the competition.
The $349 price tag is really steep though, especially when compared to
other devices in this category. With a presumably short battery life
(why not disclose it otherwise?) the Apple Watch falls prey to some of
the same shortcoming as other smartwatches, an we're inclined to see
this as an early adopter device still, and not something that everyone
should rush to get.
