On Monday the first Apple event of 2015 was held in Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. The WT team has been watching the stream live and as it happens often with Apple products started a big discussion if the watch was brilliant or not. Here is our big pros and cons list for the Apple Watch.
Reasons why you will be buying an Apple Watch and none of the other smartwatches out there
Exclusivity and Design: If you like fancy and exclusive watches you might be willing to pay a high price to buy a good watch. If this watch has capabilities like tracking your activities, sending reminders and make calls, the Apple Watch Edition with 18k gold case is the one for you. For $10,000 you can be the owner of this beauty but if you simply want a well-designed watch with a bit less “bling bling” Apple has two other watches with the same capabilities. The Apple Watch Sport from 349$ and the Apple Watch for 549$ are both “cheaper” alternatives. Besides the 3 general options for the Apple Watches (if deciding for one wouldn’t be hard enough) you also will have to decide between the sizes, 38mm or 42mm? Seems like a 4mm ”big” decision. Plus the choice between colors/materials with six different types of watch straps. From the variety of different designs the Apple Watch is unbeaten by any competitor.
Heart Rate Glance and Digital Touch: If you are a romantic you will love this new feature from the Apple Watch. You can connect one Apple Watch with another and send your heartbeat to the person you want, to let them know you think of them or simply draw a picture,send it to them and they will get it right away just like magic! Another fun way to stay connected to your beloved one and friends. Apple Watch takes advantage of the pressure-sensing technology called “Force Touch” and is able to determine the difference between a tap and a press, enabling a range of contextually specific controls. A notification system allows notifications to be relayed in a subtle way through gentle vibrations using the “Taptic Engine.”
All in all the major benefit again will be great user experience of this product that will maybe also be able to finally establish a “pay with your watch” system that people actually will want to use.
Why you won’t be buying an Apple Watch
Battery life and charging: The Apple Watch will last 18h with a typical use, which means that you will have to babysit another gadget before going to bed: your smartphone and watch. Hopefully there’s more than one socket next to your bed… Even though during the event it was claimed charging was “wireless” this does not mean that you don’t need a socket. You will still have to plug in the inductive charging station somewhere – which is practical at home but not if you are traveling.
High level of ”awesomeness”: While you think that talking to your wrist/watch will be amazing, like David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider, thanks to the built-in microphone and interact with Siri via voice-control is fun. People are not used to this high level of “coolness” (yet), so for most people it will just look weird. Also we are curious if Siri will work as reliable as it did during the demo on stage – we all have been failed by the voice control options of our smartphones before…
Apps, health and data: Apple Watch is working with medical research institutes and presented their Research Kit, which has up to 900 health apps to track your health and spot symptoms of diseases such as, diabetes, parkinson, cardiovascular diseases, asthma or breast cancer. The idea is great but the current version of watch is still not sophisticated enough to offer the tracking capabilities of a real health product. However, it might in the future.
No standalone device = No fun with Android friends: Apple Watch is designed to be a companion device to the iPhone, and as such, it requires an iPhone to function. So this means you can’t share the fun with your Android fans and the watch is just useless for you if you don’t own an iPhone.
You still have a month to think about whether to buy an Apple Watch or not, it will be available for pre-orders and preview the 10th of April and will start shipping it the 24th of the same month.
