Apple Watch Six Months On

The Apple Watch on my arm is no longer a curious novelty. It is something I have actually used daily during the six months since Apple fooled me into buying one.

Expected delivery when I ordered at the beginning of May was supposed to be “July” so I would have plenty of time to cancel my preliminary order. But 11th of May, they suddenly delivered it without warning. I could have complained, but decided to keep it.

The Apple Watch tells the time. That is actually very useful. I had forgotten that from the time of the wrist watch. I no longer need to put away bags or whatever I have in my hands to dig out a phone from my pocket to tell what time it is. I just look at my wrist, and there's the time, time of sunrise or sunset, day of week or other things I could configure it to show.

It measures my physical activity and stores it. I can tell today how far I walked the first of June and it tells me my how frequently my heart beats when I climb a high slope.

I can use it to take notes when I walk around, telling Siri to “remind” me of free text. Siri is admittedly not always good with free text. She tries to interpret it in funny ways. Nevertheless, I can work with the shortcomings, and it still is one of the most incredibly useful functions.

I can use it as a remote control with preview for my iPhone camera, which means I can take selfies from ten meters’ distance and of the back of my head. I can also stretch out my hand with the iPhone to take photos in impossible angles from just a few mm over the ground or over dangerous cliffs. See photo below.

It alerts me of messages, both SMS, iMessages and google hangouts, and it gives me the possibility to give simple replies to SMS and iMessages.

I can check calendar and mails.

It gives me weather forecasts if I ask for it.

Maps show me where I am.

It can tell me where the nearest bakery is.

It tells me how much my SNCF train is delayed, and from which platform it will leave.

The Wallet shows me flights and addresses of booked hotels.

Shazam makes it possible to identify music tracks without taking out the phone.

I can use Siri to activate the timer when boiling eggs.

The above are all functions I use fairly frequently. Not daily mind you. I do not stay at hotels every night, for example.

There are also functions I use less than I thought I would:

• Playing music or podcasts. The interface is too limited and cumbersome. I’m not even sure one can play podcasts. I think one couldn’t in the first version, but that perhaps changed in some update.
• Directions. I never know when the watch thinks I have turned left or right, so I do not know where to turn next.
• News. There is room for too little information on the tiny screen.
• Ebooks. I had expected there to be a way to read some paragraphs from ebooks line by line using the Watch, but neither Kindle nor iBooks has any Apple Watch app.

Functions I was right in thinking I would not use very much:

• Twitter. It would probably be good if I had been a compulsive twitterer, but I’m not. I check Twitter once or twice a day, and I prefer a bigger screen for that.
• Games. I never was a big gamer, and I have not found any game that fits both me and the Apple Watch.
• Photo displays. The screen is too small to show photos to your friends.
• PowerPoint remote. There is no need to use a watch to do this in most presentation environments. I just use the phone.

The Apple Watch has its limitations of course. It is understandable why Apple waited so long with the release. They wanted to get things right that apparently are impossible to get right. Too often, non Apple applications lose connection. The small screen makes it quite common to press wrong buttons. Every now and then Siri pops up when I wanted to do something else. Once (but only once) I had to shutdown and restart my iPhone to restore the Bluetooth connection.

Considering the elevated price, it is not a product to recommend to anyone who does not have much more money than I do. I bought it “by mistake” and I enjoy using it. However, if I would lose it, I could not justify the expense buying a new one.

Photo taken with iPhone held in my outstretched arm while controlled remotely from the Apple Watch.

I miss Flash - I miss the Internet

Just a few years ago, it was really easy to get a spiffing internet experience. You just went into the browser settings and deactivated Flash. Once flash was gone, pages loaded quickly and most ads were gone.

Now, it is unfortunately widespread knowledge that Flash was trash - a security risk, a usability nightmare and usually impossible to use for people with disabilities.

The sad consequence is that servers nowadays remove Flash and replace it with HTML5 animations. Besides they do other clever and processor intensive things using HTML5.

The consequence is that each page takes longer to load, and there is no magic bullet to speed them up.

In the good old days, I could open twenty pages in separate tabs with one click on Firefox. I could then spend a fraction of a second to judge whether they contained anything worth reading today, and if they didn't I just pressed ctrl-W or ⌘-W on a Mac. In less than half a minute, I had seen what I wanted to see of updated sites on the internet, and I could spend the rest of the day doing other more productive things.

Today, without Flash to disable, the internet has become so slow, that I have come to mostly stop using it.