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.
Not withstanding some silly things like the ability to send your heartbeat to friends, the Apple Watch is designed to not only collect information about physical activity, but it makes it easy to feed that information to a burgeoning ecosystem of health and fitness applications.
It was supposed to be called the iWatch, but Apple choose the more generic ‘Watch’ was both great and frustrating. Frustrating because it is going to be horrible to discuss in a sentence (“Did you mean ‘watch’ or ‘Watch’?”) but exciting because that was the only thing we all thought we knew about the device and we were wrong. Apple can still keep secrets when it wants.
If you're curious about Apple's latest offering, this is what you need to know:
Design – Two Sizes With Endless Combinations
It is often said Apple products receive so much hype that they cannot possibly live up to expectations. Given the personal nature of watch designs, this runs doubly true for the Apple Watch.
By and large, from a design perspective, Apple succeeded. The Apple Watch is arguably more conservative than many were expecting and takes a lot of the iPod-nano-as-a-wristwatch DNA, but it also does more than any other smartwatch to provide options for personalisation and it is closer to a piece of jewellery than anything we have seen from rivals so far (in fact Apple didn’t even use the term ‘smartwatch’ once in its entire presentation).
At the core of this philosophy are two Watch sizes: 38mm (1.49-inches) and 42mm (1.65-inches). Apple didn’t label them as ‘male’ and ‘female’, despite it being implied, and each is available in three editions:
Standard (stainless steel chassis)
Sports (aluminium chassis)
Edition (18 karat gold chassis which has been “formulated for hardness”)
In addition to this the trio can be paired with six different straps which come in a mixture of leather and stainless steel and a variety of colour combinations.
User Interface – Say Goodbye To Grids Of Icons
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.
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.
Battery Life
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.
Heart rate monitor
Perhaps the most useful feature of the Apple Watch is its heart rate monitor. For casual exercisers, it probably isn't critical. But for frequent exercisers who want to more accurately calculate calorie expenditure or stay within a target "cardio" or "fat burning" zone, it is a crucial feature.
Unlike a lot of fitness monitors out there, this allows the device to track your activity levels even when you aren't doing things that specifically qualify as walking or running (which can be interpreted by devices like the FitBit as taking a lot of steps very quickly). So you'll have a better shot of getting credit for things like your spin class, or biking. The device is not, however, waterproof. So swimming is out.
The Apple Watch comes with a suite of apps aimed at keeping you more active. The watch helps you set calorie-burn goals each day, keeps track of your activity levels and reminds you to keep moving.
These features aren't particularly hallmark -- you can find them in a lot of fitness accessories already on the market -- but they're good to have.
Apple Pay
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.
Price And Availability
Those convinced the Apple Watch is for them will have to wait until ‘early 2015’ to get their hands on it.
Apple Watch pricing will start at $349 compared to $199 for many Android Wear watches ($249 for the Moto 360 and Pebble Steel) and $150 for the standard Pebble. Furthermore with the option of an aluminium or gold chassis and an array of upgradable watch straps.
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.
Post by Our New Author Ayush Varshney.
Post by Our New Author Ayush Varshney.