Apple Watch: Extremely ambitious, far from perfect
Smartwatches
[MUSIC]
Apple's got a watch.
I've been using it.
What does it feel like?
Is this all you need?
Well, Apple's watch is part of a growing landscape called smart watches that are in this umbrella of wearable tech.
These things are accessories to your phone and Apple's only works with iPhone 5 or later.
So it's going to get messages and other things from your phone.
But it also works kinda like a standalone iPod.
Apple pushes three different types of core functions on the Apple Watch.
Communications, fitness and notifications.
Now notifications and glances, which is the other term for these widget-like apps, are like widgets.
Those functions on your iPhone that you get from your pull down menu, right next to your notifications.
They're like smarter mini-apps that you can check information like sports scores or weather updates or tweets.
Now, underneath all of that, there are also full apps, and it looks like a grid of iPhone apps, except they're circles, and you launch them.
A lot of them are living on your iPhone as well, and they're kind of cross-loading, so they take a little time to load.
But you can get some boiled down, simple functions, like looking at tweets and ever responding to tweets.
And a lot of different fitness apps, including Apple's core apps.
Their fitness apps are probably the most advanced on any smart watch.
They work a lot like what you get on a Fitbit.
Or some sort of a Nike FuelBand.
They look at your walking, your running, it has a heart rate monitor built in.
And it will work with GPS on your phone, and it does a lot of communication functions.
This thing will act as a speakerphone when paired with your iPhone.
It will also enable you to send texts, to dictate audio messages, or to send crazy animated emoji.
And if you find another Apple Watch owner, you can send a little doodle to them, like this.
Or you can send love taps.
Or hold your fingers here and send your heart rate.
And did I mention this thing is basically like an iPod.
You can store 2 gigs of music on this that sync over from your phone and you can listen to them if you have bluetooth headphones.
Kind of like an iPod except there is no headphone jack here.
And, it has Apple Pay, so you can pay for things at terminals, even when you're away from your iPhone.
The Apple watch comes in a range of prices, from $350 up to $17,000, but they all do the same thing inside.
They all have 8 gigs of internal storage, of which you can access around 6, and you're really paying for the design of the band and the materials.
This is a steel one, 42 millimeters.
With a white, fluoroelastomer band, this is $600.
And, the one I tried with a stainless-steel link band, $1,000.
That's crazy expensive.
And, they go all the way up to $10,000, $17,000 for the gold watch you're not gonna get.
The Apple Watch is also hindered by it's battery life.
The battery life lasts.
No longer than a day, that's lower than most other smart watches out there.
And I like wearing a watch at night so I really like to be able to use it at night for silent alarms, or to check what the time is, or to do sleep tracking.
You can't do that.
So who's the Apple Watch for?
After wearing one for a while, that's still a good question.
I'm not exactly sure, and that's the problem with it.
It's an iPhone accessory, because you need an iPhone.
It's battery life is not great.
And it's very expensive.
But if you're interested in exploring this.
And you wanna spend $350 on an entry level model.
It's possibly a toy that could appeal to some people.
I'm Scott Stein with c/net.
