The flood of major reviews of the Apple Watch is coming in, and they’re consistent:
- Apple Pay is magical.
- Nice hardware.
- Third-party apps are pretty bad.
- Haptics are cool.
- 3D emojis are not.
- This is the best smart watch.
- Using one will take some getting used to.
Joshua Topolsky at Bloomberg writes about how it’s a fair amount of work to figure out which notifications you want to get on your wrist, and says “it’s not essential. Not yet.” The Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey Fowler found it a useful second screen for the iPhone.
But, as often, read The Verge. It’s a wonderful editorial package — design, writing, conception, editing, the whole deal. Nilay Patel writes at exhaustive and entertaining length about a day with the Watch: seriously, it must have taken as long to write the thing as it did to wear it. We especially like how he related major pieces of the review with a time of day — and remaining battery life. He liked it, although he though the software slow. And, like everyone else, he found that looking at your wrist incessantly sends a different message than pulling out your phone a lot; sometimes better, sometimes worse, but different.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball goes long on his review (which is not a surprise). He talks more than most about the “watch-ness” of the watch, which he generally likes. In particular, he’s enthusiastic about the rubber sport wristband, and is positively rhapsodic about the touch elements of the interface, which are genuinely new.
Re/code’s Lauren Goode is similarly enthusiastic, and wraps up with this nice paragraph:
But Apple Watch is not a cure-all, and it’s likely not a timepiece you will pass down to your grandkids. It is a well-designed piece of technology that will go through a series of software updates, until one day, years from now, when the lithium ion battery can no longer hold much of a charge and it won’t seem as valuable to you.
Fair enough: it’s nice technology. But it’s not the keepsake that some may have been hoping for.