Apple Watch Series 3 Review
This is my first time with an Apple Watch of any sort; my last smartwatch was a Pebble which was helpful but utilitarian. When I saw LTE connectivity from my wrist with built-in Siri capability, capacity to make phone calls apart from my phone and all in a waterproof device, it felt like a chance to explore whether I could have a “phone lite” experience that would allow me to leave my phone behind more and thus seemed worth running the experiment. But so far, it has failed to replace my phone.
The device itself is truly beautiful. It’s lighter than I would have expected, smoothly rounded, weighs not very much but also doesn’t feel flimsy or insubstantial. It is an Object. 10/10 on industrial design. They are so good at this.
The box was pretty and substantial, though had the same issue as most Apple gear, which is that the excessively tight shrinkwrapping means you can’t but damage the nice white box in removing the shrinkwrap. 9/10 on unboxing.
The setup process was quite straightforward with my iPhone, using some kind of beautiful voodoo 3D blue pointcloud QR code thingy to pair the two. The wizard had a number of steps, but each was clearly presented and wasn’t confusing at all. 10/10 on onboarding. Only ding here was that they don’t broadcast that you’re going to have to pay your carrier another $10/mo. Boo. But the flow was very simple w/Verizon.
I decided on the Sport Loop since the plastic bands didn’t seem very breathable and Milanese Loop looked neat but spending $300 extra just for a band seemed weirdly excessive, especially for an experiment. The Sport Loop fabric is perfectly chosen — soft to the touch but giving a real sense of durability. Within minutes of putting it on, it was “invisible” — I don’t think I’ve ever put on a new object and had it so seamlessly on my body. If Apple ever gets into implantable devices, they will make them very comfortable. 10/10 on the band.
The other thing that is really nicely done is the Activity and Breathe apps that encourage to to stand, to get your exercise, and to do a little focused breathing. The whole “fill in the rings” concept is clear, beautifully conceived, and well executed, with good phone integration with the Activity and Health apps. (They’re all made by Apple so there really wouldn’t be an excuse to screw this up — but bully on them for executing this so well. It’s lovely.) 9/10.
I did manage to make a call from my wrist and — I’ll be honest — this is why you’d get something like this. You feel like Dick Tracy. The quality is totally usable. We’re finally in the future OMG. 9/10.
The default watchfaces are pretty and animated nicely — the Mickey face in particular is delightfully well done and even has Mickey speak the time when tapped. 8/10.
But here is where things start to fall apart — and they go downhill quickly. Of all things, a watch must excel at telling time. To tell time well, a watch ought immediately and legibly show its wearer the hour, the minute, the day of the week and the day of the month. The hour ought be the clearest indicated, followed by the minute, with the day of the week and day of the month visible in smaller face elsewhere. Somewhat startlingly, I found that *none* of the watchfaces delivered well on this promise. My favorite so far is the jellyfish face as it technically shows all of these, but the lovely animated jellyfish are about the same color and intensity as the information being displayed so neither renders with great clarity. Furthermore, the time is not always shown; with an eInk display (or better using their existing OLED), a relatively static display of the time and date could in theory be shown without severely draining the watch. I find the Apple Watch wakes when I don’t want to and also can be difficult to wake when I do — it’s not quite magical enough to wake, which means I’d prefer if the time were just always showing. (Note: I don’t need a fancy 60fps animation to tell me the hour and minute!!) And the battery only lasts part of a day — I’ll admit to being spoiled with multi-day eInk displays and perpetual mechanical watches, so a dead watch that doesn’t tell time makes me sad. That *is* a fair comparison though since the mechanical and Apple watches are competing for the same real estate on my wrist. So on actually being a good watch? Maybe 5/10.
The Siri functionality, a big selling point, requires connectivity and works extraordinarily poorly. Lots of “hold, on, I didn’t get that”, “let me tap you when I’m ready”, and “Siri isn’t working right now”. I tried “send a message to my wife” about twenty times before any message got sent — and the output was to send a message to B that consisted of literally “send a message to my wife”. (sigh). The one thing that did work well was drawing stupid little animated things to iMessage to people. 2/10.
Really no excuse — this is putatively a piece of LTE gear *and* there was WiFi where I was having trouble. The super weird part is that there’s no obvious WiFi menu where you can see if the Watch is connected to WiFi or to pick an AP to which to associate; the extra weird part is that various bits of the UI chide you to “make sure your Watch is connected to WiFi” but there’s literally no way to do that or to see if that’s happened. You can’t see your signal strength clearly. There exists a huge opportunity here for a device to include an onboard speech processor; being able to fluidly understand my request and execute on it immediately even with spotty connectivity is critical to a dependable user experience. I can say that I do not feel comfortable yet counting on my watch being able to reliably understand me or do what I ask of it, and that to me was a healthy portion of the reason why you would want a device like this. So on connectivity, 3/10. And yes, I updated my firmware to latest as soon as I got the watch.
The other reason you’d have a device like this is because it would allow you to mostly keep your phone in your pocket. It’d in theory tell you when there was something you really needed to know about and let you either respond in situ, set a reminder to follow up with that thing, or whip out your phone as-needed if a more complex interaction was required. The Watch fails at this very badly for everything except iMessage and phone calls. Most other application alerts are not particularly helpful, or if you have an app that doesn’t have rich Watch integration yet built in, you still have to pull out your phone. (Yes, that’s not technically Apple’s fault, but this ends up defeating a lot of the point of having a Watch otherwise.) 2/10
Worse yet, the watch sometimes has unexpected interactions as a remote for my phone that are undesirable. For instance, when I’m having my phone stream music to my car over Bluetooth, my watch becomes a remote to pause the music — in theory, that’s nice but in practice it means if you are trying to check the time as you’re driving in, you may end up accidentally pausing your music instead. Gah. I’ve found the watch interfering with my phone usage as much as empowering me. A superior implementation would act as “secretary” and understand when I would likely to be bothered about what. A fantastically good implementation would give me reminders for things I hadn’t even explicitly set (hey, you have a free moment now, you’d better work on your Tuesday presentation coming up) and quench reminders unlikely to be important or require urgent response. Apple’s very far behind in thinking about and executing well on such A.I.
A watch is not a new “human mounting location” like Google Glass or even Bluetooth headsets so doesn’t suffer from social acceptance issues. This makes it highly desirable as it has the potential for extremely rapid adoption if the experience becomes obviously positive enough. Apple has done much to demonstrate what an attractive device can be in that form factor. (As have Pebble, Misfit, etc for alternate purposes.)
Overall, my experience with the watch tells me that it is possible to make a beautiful, comfortable gadget on the wrist that is highly socially accepted, but that Apple has failed to deliver a holistically highly compelling “away from the phone” or “phone lite” experience. Apple’s vision is correct — to orient the interaction mode around speech and simple gestures — but their implementation is poor enough that the window for acing this market is still wide open. I think Google’s continued improvements in hardware competence (Pixel 2, Home Mini) give the company a shot at landing this, but I also think that a number of the Chinese companies like Huawei, OnePlus, or Xiaomi that already manufacture at scale, are showing capability to make high end devices, could conceivably pair up with Baidu or Alibaba’s AI talent to deliver a truly smart watch. So your wrist is likely to be a battleground for some time.
Watch this space. #PunIntended
