Before even going on sale the Apple Watch, which some affectionately call the iWatch, has already polarised opinion around the globe. You probably either believe it's a product moving technology in a positive direction or one simply not worth the time of day. In reality it's neither one nor the other.
Three years in the making, the Apple Watch isn't the first smartwatch to the market by a long shot, and certainly won't be the last. In those years, we've seen the rise and fall of the Nike FuelBand, the rise of Pebble, of Android Wear watches, of Samsung getting to grips with multiple wearable operating systems, and a barrage of other wearable bands and attachments in-between.
Apple comes into this crowded market with not only something to prove, but an approach that is different: the Watch is as much a fashion statement as it is a functional tool to get stuff done. Oh, and to tell the time.
But can the Apple Watch walk the fine line between fashion and function? Is it an accessory that others will lust after and promote your social standing - regardless of how vain you fancy being that week?
We've been wearing an Apple Watch on the wrist since its UK launch - having now experienced what it's like to use in daily life and how people react to it - to bring you our definitive verdict.Â
A strapping statement
There are three variations of the Apple Watch, available at three very different price points. The core experience of each is identical, so whether you opt for the aluminium, stainless steel or rose gold model the interface and what it can do doesn't change, the materials used and price point do.
And that price variation is quite drastic, ranging from the entry-level silicon band of the £299 Apple Watch Sport, to the £13,500 Rose Gold Apple Watch Edition. In the middle sits the "normal" Apple Watch - a stainless steel variant, available either polished or in black, complete with a sapphire crystal front - with a choice of straps, priced between £479 to £949 total. For this review, we've got the silver stainless steel with a Milanese Loop, priced £599.
These straps - from Milanese Loop and metal link bracelet, to leather or silicon options - are easily changeable, sliding out to be replaced for different occasions. If, that is, you can afford spare ones. In addition Apple has already confirmed details of a "Made for Apple Watch" strap programme and we expect a number of exclusive seasonal straps to surface to tie-in with spring-summer and autumn-winter fashion cycles. It's easy to imagine other tie-ins with fashion houses, or an exclusive WWDC (Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference) strap.
Important though the strap choice is, back to the watch itself. Available in two sizes - with either a 38mm or 42mm rectangular OLED screen measure, loosely pitched as men's and women's devices - it fits comfortably on the wrist, well balanced in weight.
Hidden at the back of the watch are the two cameras and two lights that point at your skin ready to read your heart rate. If the black OLED screen on the front of the watch didn't give it away, seeing the underside certainly does: this isn't your average digital watch.
Changing faces, turning heads
Indeed, the craftsmanship is exquisite. Our polished silver model has an air of Tiffany about it, although the black stainless steel version is more "manly", while the lesser polished Apple Watch Sport doesn't appear as "premium" in its approach.
This isn't the LG Watch Urbane or the Huawei watch, both of which have taken their design ethos from watches like the Rolex Yachtmaster and Tag Heuer Carrera. Apple's lead designer, Jony Ive, has a love of clean lines that is ever apparent in the Apple Watch - the way the curved glass drops off to curved metal, there's not a single sharp edge on the thing. The design language apes other Apple products, but at the same time forms its own statement.
Watches are fickle things and Apple's approach to tackle this is to let you change the straps and the faces, rather than try and create multiple cases by design. It's the same approach as Android Wear, which offers a variety of downloadable watch face options.
So whether you want something timeless and classic or something more punchy will depend on your style, or even your mood at the time. You might even want to go with Mickey Mouse, and why not. However there are no third-party watch faces, as it's not an open platform system.
We have been wearing smartwatches for the last couple of years, but the world seems to always forget that Apple isn't the first player in this market. Pretty much everyone we've met since we've been wearing Apple Watch has commented on it, from mother-in-laws to tech-savvy friends. We've been pointed at on the train and the tube. We've become the talk of the party with people wanting to know more. Even meetings have stopped mid flow because clients have spotted it on our wrist.Â
For the time being, the Apple Watch is very much a novelty, a watch that will garner attention, that will see you become the demo person as you show off what it can do. But it was the same deal with the Nike FuelBand, the first Pebble, and no doubt will be the same with other devices in the future.
A crown for complexity
Part of that interest stems from the Apple Watch's operating system, because it's so different to any Apple OS that has come before it. And more complex.Sporting a rectangular display rather than a classic round face, it's a better shape for reading notifications, but the icons and user interface is predominantly circular in its approach - an apparent play on replicating the digital crown control that sits on the right side, slightly above the middle of the watch.
The Watch operating system is based around three distinct areas - the watch face, Glances, and apps - with the digital crown the main physical controller, used to dial in and out of apps, elements within those apps, or return to the home page.
The digital crown isn't the only controller though. You can also voice command, push, talk, swipe, touch, tap and Force Touch press (different touch pressures resulting in different actions) your way through the interface. If you stop to think of all the possibilities the Watch presents, you'll quickly become overwhelmed.
It took us a couple of days to get to grips with the intricacies of the new interface and how to effectively interact with it. But once it's etched into your brain it quickly becomes second nature.
Saying that, interacting with such a small screen is often fiddly (and we have the larger 42mm model). Everyone we've shown over a given age has suggested they would need glasses to use it on a regular basis. Thankfully we've got 20:20 vision to view those dinky icons.
'The Apple Watch flick'
Move your wrist and the Apple Watch springs into life showing you the time, just like many other wearable devices. Well that's the idea.This wrist motion activation works most of the time, although you will find yourself adopting a certain "Apple Watch flick", as we are calling it, to make sure it happens. That's no good for casual glances in a meeting, but perfectly fine when it comes to raising your arm to see what time it is.
To conserve battery the screen quickly goes dark again. There's no way to force the screen to be on all the time, but you can always press the digital crown to illuminate the screen once more.
The many faces of Apple
In addition to the 10 main current watch faces, there are a series of options (or complications as Apple calls them) to further manipulate the visuals. You can change the colour, reduce or add elements, or determine what auxiliary information, like moon cycles for example, to add or remove.
The designs range from serious to fun, through to kooky - so there should be something to suit everyone. You can create variations of the faces to be stored and selected so you can have five versions of, let's say, the Simple watch face, and no Astronomy watch faces.
The kids will love Mickey, the do-ers Utility, and those looking for something different might like Motion's featuring of either jelly fish, butterflies, or flowers. There are some clangers though: X-Large is typographically disgusting.
As with all smartwatches, the beauty of it being just that is that you can change the face with a long press on the screen (Force Touch) so the moment you go off a design, find yourself in a different environment, or fancy a change, you can easily do that.
There are some frustrations. You can't have third party watch face apps (one of the great things about the Pebble, for example), nor can you currently have faces change based on the time of day or your location.
Strangely there is also no watch face that allows you feature your pictures as you can on the lock screen of the iPhone. And while you can have certain "complications" on certain faces, you can't have them all for all faces. For example a shortcut to the stopwatch is only available on the Chronograph watch face and not the Utility face.
Glances: Favourite apps
One of the key ways to interact with the Apple Watch is through Glances.These are best seen as shortcuts to an app and allow you to quickly see what's happening. Swiping up from the bottom of the watch face reveals your Glances and then a swipe left and right accordingly cycles through them.
You can manage which Glances you can see via the Apple Watch app for iPhone - and it's only from here you can determine whether or not a Glance is active or not. The app is also the hub where you will find apps that will work with the Apple Watch from its own store to save you having to randomly hunt them down in the main Apple App store.
By default Apple offers a number of Glances, such as your next calendar appointment, how much battery you have left, your heart rate, or activating Airplane Mode for both Watch and iPhone. We find it more approachable than Android Wear's cards, which feature everything all at once - not ideal if you're always checking the same thing over and over again.
Third-party app developers can also offer Glances. Shazam, for example, allows you quickly tap to "listen" to music you are wanting to know more about without having to even touch your phone.
It can be frustrating to have to swipe through all the Glances you have as there is no quick way to get from one end to another without swiping like mad, so managing them is going to be key. Or just don't activate too many.
Notifications
Key to any smartwatch success is how it handles notifications. Pebble's approach has always been to bludgeon you into submission with everything more or less mirrored from your phone. Android Wear flicks up cards, with the option to disable those you don't want to ever see on your watch.Apple's take is largely different. Depending on what you are doing with either your watch or your iPhone will affect on what happens with the notifications and how they are received. The idea is that if you are looking at your phone you don't get an unnecessary alert on the Watch seconds later (but it doesn't always work that way, with text messages being one example that always come through regardless of what you are doing). Android Wear has a similar option.
When using the Watch you don't want to be constantly interrupted with notifications blocking the screen. That means you either get a definitive notification that takes over the screen completely or, to not obscure the view, a simple red dot appears at the top of the watch face - waiting to drive you insane in the same way the blinking red light on your BlackBerry used to.
A swipe down from the top of the watch face gets the full list of notifications with the ability to close them one by one or to clear them all via a long press on the screen.
If you've read a notification on your phone it should disappear from the watch (although we've found this doesn't always happen), while those you do click on will either open the app they are from or let you delve a little deeper by, for example, viewing more text before then opening the app in full. Some apps support good notifications, others don't.
If you've been staring at your phone, or using it as a personal hotspot, you are not bothered by the Watch at all. While the approach makes sense, it does sometimes get you second guessing whether it is working or not. On our first day, we happily admit that we thought email notifications weren't working, when in reality we had just been on the phone a lot, and therefore cancelling out those watch-based notifications.Â
For text messages the Apple Watch allows you reply to them either with a series of suggested one word replies, or by dictating via Siri as either text or voice message. Sadly you can't edit the words, but you can choose not to send the message if it goes wrong. But when it does you'll wish you had just grabbed your phone and done it how you always have.
If the notification alerts can sometimes lead to confusion, then the in-built haptic motors' vibration feedback won't always help either. Put simply, they aren't as powerful as they should be, especially if you like to wear your watch loosely.
Apps: Focus on third party
There are already thousands of apps available for the Apple Watch. The question, of course, is whether those apps are any use to anyone. The quick answer is that most of them aren't.From Apple you get core things like world clock, a stopwatch, Weather, Photos, Passbook, Activity Monitor, Maps, Music, and Siri, and remotes for Keynote, Apple TV, and one for your camera that lets you see and snap from the Watch. These add value, but are limited in their appeal - the Keynote remote, for example, does exactly what it says but for most will never be used.
A lot of focus has been placed on third-party app support. But as the Apple Watch is a new experience use case, it means some apps work well, while others don't.
Take the Twitter app for example: aside from allowing you to see and reply to your tweets when you are mentioned, the app itself believes that you'll want to read your Twitter timeline five tweets at a time before hitting a read more button. Seriously?
Or the Facebook app. It gives you zero access to Facebook, but will happily tell you that "Chris has commented" and nothing more. Talk about a waste of time.
There are some "doing apps" like Evernote or a Philips Hue remote, or the chance to track your Uber from your wrist, but the experience is so muddled at the moment that many aren't worth bothering with.
What doesn't help is that the apps can be tediously slow at times. Expect to see the waiting graphic a lot if you plan to do anything other than look at the time or your notifications. Case in point is Shazam: accessing the listening feature normally resulted in the Watch screen turning off before it could find the results.
The Apple Watch is powered by Apple's new dedicated S1 Chip which professes to be the perfect processor for the job, but in reality many of the apps force you to wait to load information. Either Apple's processor isn't up to the job or the data connection to iPhone isn't good enough.
Apple Pay and NFC
It's fair to say that one of the biggest possible use cases for the Apple Watch will be Apple Pay. It's much like contactless card payments, bringing the ability to buy goods and services with a single touch.We've tested Apple Pay out at the original Apple Watch launch in the US, but the service still isn't available in the UK. When we get an Apple Watch in the US we will be updating this review with how payments using the Apple Watch work in a real-world environment.
Other near-field use cases include using the Watch to open your hotel room - a service offered by Starwood hotels. This is available at some UK properties, such as the W Hotel in London's Leicester Square, among plenty of others across the globe. Not that we've been able to test this in person just yet, but it's the kind of thing we're excited to see more of.
Friends
Within the Apple Watch app you can do a number of things on your iPhone. Select music playlists and photo albums to sync, select active your notifications, setup Apple Pay, select your preferred Glances, adjust your Home screen layout, and explore third-party watch apps.
Perhaps most interesting is the addition of Friends. With a button dedicated to accessing your 12 best friends (read disciples) Apple is placing a strong emphasis on you talking and sharing your experience with others.
Press the Friends button at any point wherever you are and you'll be whisked into a screen that looks like an old fashioned phone dialler. The centre dial gives you a picture (where available) of your chosen friend, while the 12 smaller surrounding circles give you each friend's initials. Using the digital crown to highlight them and then your finger to select them specifically, you can then either opt to call them, text them, or if they've also got an Apple Watch send them a special emoji only reserved for Apple Watch owners.Â
The dedicated Apple Watch messages, called Digital Touches, come in two forms: emoji, or special screen interactions from you either tapping, drawing, or (if you are feeling overly special) your heartbeat. The experience is playful and fun, but with such a small screen you don't have much space for drawing and the moment you do the gestures begin recording. You aren't going to be able to send them a Mona Lisa.
Talking to your watch
Just like Dick Tracy you can talk to your watch. With Apple Watch there are times when you are actively encouraged to do so, but you might not always feel so superhero about it.At any time you can simply bark "Hey Siri" and ask it a question, with the answer spat back out. You can also use Siri to open apps, ask for the weather, or start a text: "Hey Siri text Frances" or "Hey Siri open the camera app". Â
For messages that means you can dictate your replies straight from the watch and this is one of the better features. No, you don't have to fiddle with a dedicated miniature keyboard, but you do have to have a decent connection on your phone. If you're on GPRS or Edge then forget it.Â
Taking a call is, as you might imagine, incredibly awkward. You'll look like you are performing some sort of dance as you jostle the watch between your mouth and your ear. When in the car, however, one hand on the steering wheel, it is just about okay.
However, the speaker is lacklustre (it is not even enabled for music playback), but if you need to take a call and can't find your phone because it's in a bag or another room (as will be the case once you start wearing the Watch) it does offer a solution.
Battery and charging
In the run-up to release there were plenty of concerns that the battery of the Apple Watch would be appalling and that it wouldn't last a day.With heavy use it won't last beyond a day, but we've had a 6am start with a 1am finish - and we still had over 20 per cent of battery by bed time. Over the UK Bank Holiday weekend with reduced emails and calls we easily managed two full days of use from a single charge of the battery.
Apple Watch is charged via a dedicated magnetic clip that snaps onto the back of the watch unit. It's not perfect for travelling but we are sure Apple will eventually sell the charging cable if you need one elsewhere or if you lose the 2-metre-long one that's included in the box.
The magnetic charging cable uses Apple's MagSafe technology with inductive charging, which is a completely sealed system free of exposed contacts. It's very forgiving for alignment too: you simply hold the connector near the back of the watch and the magnets cause it to snap into place automatically.
What is noticeable however is that you will see additional drain of your iPhone's battery, especially if you move locations. With heavy notification use we estimate it reduces iPhone use by about 2 hours in a day. If you are already struggling to get to the end of the day on a single charge then adding the Apple Watch isn't going to help you in any way, even if it helps you use it less. iPhone 6 Plus users shouldn't notice any major difference thanks to the more capacious battery.
If the Apple Watch battery is running low you can opt to turn on Power Reserve mode, reducing the Watch to nothing more than a miniature ugly looking timer that does nothing else. Even worse you have to restart the Watch to get it back to normal. Not what we were expecting. Yuk.Â
Activity
When the Apple Watch isn't acting as your watch, it is tracking your movement and fitness. However, with no GPS on board you have to still have your phone with you if you want it to be accurate.The Activity app tracks movement, exercise, whether you are standing, your steps taken and calories burned. It doesn't record sleep, but that time's better used for recharging the battery.
Beyond that there is also a Workout app, allowing you to record your runs, although you can use third-party apps like Nike or Runkeeper instead. Runs can be set to a goal like time, calories, miles, or "open" where the Watch displays a selection of relevant data on the screen at any given time. Annoyingly you can't configure or customise which stats are shown so you will have to swipe your way through the screens if you want more than one stat. At the end of a workout you get a very basic list of data.Â
All activity data, including your heart rate - which by default is recorded every 10 minutes whenever you wear the watch - is stored on your iPhone so you can then browse through the data on a bigger screen.Â
Verdict
The Apple Watch is a powerful smartwatch with plenty of features on offer - from calls, to notifications, and thousands of apps all on your wrist. But there's nothing to set it apart from the competition. Put simply, the Apple Watch doesn't deliver the transformative experience that the iPod, iPhone, or iPad did at their respective launches.And so to our earlier point: the Apple Watch is the most fashion-aware take on the smartwatch yet. It's a more luxurious accessory than the competition offers, and if all you want it for is to tell the time then, well, that's okay. We expect nothing more from a Patek Philippe other than to look good and tell the time, but when it comes to gadgets we are a far more brutal, far more expecting of it to do something more, to enrich our lives, to help us get things done. This is Apple trying to buck that trend.
Apple Watch really is a luxury too, because you don't need it most of the time - so if you're a phone hog there's arguably zero point in owning one. But to say it's a failure is to misunderstand what it's trying to do, yet to say it's an outright must-buy is overstating the mark.
As smartwatch advocates - and we've been wearing one or other for the last two and a half years by choice - we get it. What Apple has created is fantastic, but it hasn't fully addressed the social issues associated with wearing such a device on your wrist.
The hard part for Apple is not convincing many that they want an Apple Watch, but that they want a smartwatch full stop. And as many people were keen to tell us when we first showed them, they "weren't sold" on the idea, which is not the same response we got after showing them the iPod, iPhone or iPad for the first time.
This is Apple's toughest sell yet.
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