It's challenging to comprehend the total weight of eyeballs in the technology world. Indeed, I've tried for the last five minutes to little success. But it is such a weight Tim Cook figuratively must have felt today as he took to the stage at Apple's event here in California.
Every journalist, Apple fan and geek focussed their gaze to see if the year of increasingly loud rumours were true: was Apple to enter the smartwatch market?
The answer was yes. Defying brand convention by dispensing with the "i" prefix, Cook revealed the "Apple Watch". It's a timepiece (and yes it does tell the time -- we checked) that reveals design chief Jony Ive's meticulous skill for crafting a clean aesthetic and a smart interface has not diminished in a post-Jobs Apple.
We were on hand to test the Apple Watch at the Cupertino event, and I am as pleased as befits a journalist to report that it is a beautiful device in person. On the wrist it's lighter in weight than I expected, which has become something of a trend -- I said the same of Motorola's Moto 360 recently. The screen is vibrant; in line with its "Retina" moniker, it presents a sharp, clear image with excellent viewing angles.
It feels like many Apple products do: extremely well-built, elegantly presented and really very modern. The leather strap on my test model fastened with a satisfying little thump of magnet on magnet. There was a sense of luxury in a way I found lacking on the Moto 360, for example.
Arguably the most unexpected twist in Cook's reveal was just that: a twist -- the watch is controlled in part by a rotating "digital crown", or "dial on the side of the watch" to the rest of us. Ive's analogue flourish blends a physical, and, in today's Apple portfolio, unconventionally mechanical, interface into the otherwise high-tech digital proceedings. It rotates without any real physical response. No clicks, no real resistance to being turned. Give it a decent push inwards and you'll return to the watch's homescreen.
The screen's array of circular icons is unusual for a reason that may have gone unnoticed: there are no accompanying words.
Logos for the applications each icon represents have had to be designed to communicate meaning without a helping hand from the alphabet. They succeed. Many will be familiar to iOS users; others -- new fitness apps, not to mention those of third-party developers -- will need experimenting with to understand their function at first. Whether this steepens the learning curve for technophobic or techno-unfamiliar users will be a real-world test worth observing.
As I was being guided through a demonstration of the device sat on my wrist, I felt myself admitting in my head that I was quite impressed. Interface and design aside, certain small features stood out as seeming useful: the maps app that guides you to turn left or right using only a distinct vibration; the ability to use the screen as a viewfinder for the iPhone's camera; and the ability to control Apple TV or iTunes. The latter example here reminds me of Casio's calculator watches of the 1990s, which used an infrared bulb to let you control your TV from your wrist.
The integration of fitness apps and sensors was not unexpected.
The interfaces created for Apple's own activity trackers manage to present more detail than Samsung's Tizen Gear devices and can tie in with third-party apps, such as those from Nike, or equivalents from Apple. It makes them more open-feeling (which is not something one often says of Apple) than some of the present competition, but the true usefulness of these features were difficult to gauge on the crowded floor of an Apple demo suite. We'll return to this in our review.
It's not all wolf whistles for design and Nobel prizes for smart technology though. There was barely a mention for battery life.
Will it last a day? Three? Presently smartwatches tend to hover between two and five days but Apple glossed over this, which doesn't fill me with confidence.
There's also no headphone socket despite the device being able to store media on its internal memory. I was hoping to hear there was Wi-Fi so this could be AirPlayed to speakers, but the Wi-Fi comes from an iPhone paired over Bluetooth. It's not native to the watch. So it's there -- Bluetooth -- where the answer lies for how you'll be able to listen to music on a run. I wouldn't personally file this under "problematic" but it's a consideration to keep in mind, particularly since an iPhone absolutely has to be owned in order to utilise what the Apple Watch offers. My first impression was to consider iPhone and Watch inseparable, even if technically they can function apart.
My final thought was to understand how "smart" this smartwatch is -- if Apple even considers it so; the word "smartwatch" was never uttered on stage today. It's beautiful, very capable and in my limited time with it a very different type of system to Android Wear or Samsung's Gear range. But how smart it is will be learned after using it for several days or weeks. I don't want another screen to just see notifications on, or to pause a song, or to see whether the sun has got his hat on. I want it to be intelligent, decide certain things for me, disturb me only when it knows I'm likely to find a disturbance both convenient and necessary. A smart friend knows that if your cat has just passed away, posting a cat photo on your Facebook wall isn't appropriate even though they know you love cats. A smart watch needs to do the same thing, but with information and detail more tertiary to your day's activities.
Apple may well have cracked this but it's impossible to know at this point. What I do know is that I have seen and used a device today that gave me confidence that, as an industry, the smartwatch is not a fad or a stopgap -- it's not a netbook, fiercely attacking the laptop market until the iPad was fully baked. There is something in this trend and although Apple still needs to convince me "who" this is for and "why" I might be one of them, I'm reassured by what I saw today. Maybe this is something that can give a smartwatch holdout like me a reason to have a change of heart.
I guess, like the heart of the watches themselves, it's about time.
By Nate Lanxon
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
