3 Months Into The iWatch

3 Months into owning the iWatch, it's got some issues but it's still the best out there

3 Months into the iWatch

I was out of internet contact when the iWatch was released, but I ordered one as soon as I got back. This is not an endorsement in itself -- I'm hopeless enough a fanboy that if Apple released a new gizmo that punched you in the solar plexus every five minutes, I'd probably be lining up in the predawn hours for it. But I'd tried a couple of fitness trackers before, and (briefly) a Casio smartwatch, so I had some sense of what to measure it against. I've been wearing it for a little bit over three months now, and my impressions have largely solidified. Here are a few of them:

Aesthetically, I am not impressed.

In the promotional video, the iWatch had me enthralled. Out of the box, however (especially with the clunky silicon band it comes with), I thought it looked weird. Three months have done little to change this. The watch face options are too few, and can only be "customized" in surprisingly limited ways. Its casing is a little too bulky, and when it's not showing the time, its empty black screen gives the impression that it's broken or something.

Its functionality is (thus far) too limited.

This might not continue to be the case for very long, given that I thought the same thing about the iPhone when it came out, but it is for now. The apps it handles are pretty much all available on your smartphone, and aren't as user-friendly when scaled down to a tiny screen. If it could work as a sleep monitor, like, say, the Up band, that would help a lot -- but it can't (yet) because...

The battery life is too short.

This one kind of makes me want to scream at Apple sometimes, because they seem to liketheir products to require nightly charging. Why, I have no idea. I've heard the idea tossed around of putting a battery in the band, so you can swap them out and recharge one while using the other, but until this simple and effective solution appears, I will have to use the accompanying magnetic charger disc thing. I travel with a little pouch full of different cords and plugs and adapters for Apple products, and frankly, it's already too full.

The chime and buzz you get for an alert are too faint.

When a text came in on my iPhone, it used to make a quite audible sound; one I could choose from a decent-sized list of options so that it would be easy to recognize as my own. Now, when it's linked to the iWatch (which it pretty much is every waking hour), there are no options to choose from. You get an extremely quiet chime noise, and an almost imperceptible, joy-buzzer-through-a-foot-of-cotton (and that's with it turned up to the max) sensation on your wrist. Gentle ambient noise, or any movement of your arm, make them both disappear completely. While you can set it so most alerts come through your iPhone, this is not, for some reason, true of text messages. I do almost all my communications through text messages these days, and pride myself on responding quickly when I get one. Now I miss a LOT of them when they first arrive. This is probably my most serious complaint about the iWatch, and seems incredibly easy for Apple to address. Get on it, guys.

Turning it towards you to activate it sucks.

If your wrist happens already to be turned in the general direction of your face -- if it's on an armrest or your lap, for example -- turning it towards you is too slight a movement to register, and the watch stares at you blankly. You look like a fool repeatedly flipping your arm around trying to wake it up. Gotta figure out a way to make its display constant.

I tried going back to my old watch and couldn't.

I figured I must not like the iWatch, until I tried going back a few weeks ago. My old watch felt Neolithic. Without a display of my next calendar appointment staring me in the face whenever I checked the time, I found myself procrastinating too often. The outdoor temperature was suddenly vital information for my peace of mind. I'd really come to like the activity monitor (although I seldom pay attention to the heart rate tracker). And it may be a bit geeky, but I like using it for ApplePay whenever possible, too.

In conclusion:

The iWatch seems like a mistake, but it's not. In another iteration or two (hopefully), they'll have fixed some of its issues and there'll be more apps better suited to a wristwatch. I'm not a watch collector, but I've tried a few over the years, and although it took me a while to realize it, this is probably the best one I've ever owned.

Oh; and I know it's technically called the Apple Watch, but I still call it the iWatch. Sorry.