Second Impressions

For the first time I can remember, Apple has overbuilt the hell out of a battery. This Apple Watch has never dropped below 29% before it gets to the charger, and that was a circumstance where I put it on my arm fully charged at 10 PM, slept in it, wore it all day, attached a Bluetooth headset to it around 7:30 PM the following day and played music, from the watch, for two hours.  My theory (and my brother-in-law’s) is that the battery was spec’d out at a time when there were going to be more powerful (and more busy) sensors in the watch, not to mention native apps running directly on the watch. So that battery may drop non-trivially when watchOS 2 hits in the autumn.

Having the fitness tracking on my arm has been extremely effective.  I look at the circles, I make sure they get filled, I stand up when I’m told, I take the stairs instead of the elevator, I walk out to a computer rather than relying on remote support. And in the course of doing this, I rely on coffee (largely unsweetened except for the occasional drip-drop of stevia) and sparking water from the office SodaStream (rarely adultered with so much as ice). I haven’t bought anything out of a vending machine in a week and a half. Lunch is almost always salad and unsweet tea and doesn’t come with a big Rice Krispie Treat tossed in the bag.  I can’t remember when I last bought a Coke Zero.  Sure, Sunday got a little wacky because I was at a soccer game and a pub after, but that was one day and it let off a lot of steam to let me be good on the other days.

It’s to the point that I’m wondering how I’ll wear this abroad if my iPhone is locked.  The Moto X is still the designated travel phone because it’s free to use any old nano-SIM, but there’s no using it with the Apple Watch (and I can’t go back to the Pebble, let’s be honest – nothing it can do is of any particular use to me when going abroad, which is why it stayed behind on the Japan trip). I’m not going to be amused if this all boils down to me having to splash out on an unlocked iPhone next time out, but then, it’s not like I wasn’t already indentured to the Apple ecosystem. Then again, the X may or may not be that viable by the time we next go abroad – it’s not like the camera’s worth a damn compared to an iPhone, and while the battery life seems much improved, it’s not going to play my iTunes collection…

There’s a little paradox-of-choice going on here, the same issue that leads to me having way too many Nerf guns that are 80% of what I’m looking for instead of the perfect one.  Through happenstance I wound up with an iPhone from work, a Moto X on my own, and an iPad mini on my own, and left to my own devices (see what I did there) I could probably lose the work iPhone and carry on just fine for the foreseeable future. But now I have the Apple Watch and that means iPhone. Which is fine, given that there hasn’t been an Android that compelled me since the coming of the original Moto X.  But if I did have to go out and buy a new phone on my own, it would be tough not to just take the iPhone 5C in white, cut my audio loadout by 75% and get by as long as I could, because after getting so much phone for $350, the thought of laying down double that is a bit tough to take. Then again, if I could get the T-Mobile $30 plan still…but that’s a problem for another time.

Other than that, the only real issue I have with the watch is that I haven’t yet sorted out that force-press is different from just long-press. I have screens dipping out under my finger ever so slightly as if they don’t know whether to go away or not, and I haven’t gotten use to just giving the on-screen button a thump – or force-pressing to see other controls and options (like, say, switching the watch from getting its music off the phone to its own local storage). But the much-debated “learning curve” isn’t that big a deal – this is for notification and quick action and not pulling the phone out of your pocket. And it’s a lifesaver in that regard – the two-factor authentication app for work runs on the watch and it’s so much more convenient to use 2FA now.

I’m glad I bought it.  It seems to have stifled the television glee and the car glee and several other glees, so I guess that alone is worthwhile.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.