The future is here (it just doesn’t last the whole day yet)

It’s almost four years since I blogged about my initial experience of using my first Apple Watch (https://bytherye.com/2015/05/10/apple-watch-a-few-thoughts-after-my-first-week/).

At the time I could see that it had lots of potential, but ‘unless you’re a bit of a geek I’d probably recommend waiting a bit before leaping in.‘

Roll forward to today and I’ve just experimented with leaving my phone and iPad at home and using the Watch (now a Series 4 with mobile data, coupled with Bluetooth headphones for listening to audio) as my only connected device for the whole day. I decided to do this because I was taking part in a run this evening and wanted to minimise what I carried with me, but it also seemed like a good opportunity to see how far things have come since 2015.

It went pretty well. But I have spent a day with major battery anxiety!

The good stuff was that I could do loads of stuff without needing my phone, including:

• Making and receiving phone calls, text messages, other instant messages (including Hangouts and WhatsApp) and emails
• Listening to podcasts and music
• Paying for food and my train fare
• Checking my diary and travel times
• Tracking my running time and counting down the kilometres until the finish line

It wasn’t as easy to use for the written communication as my phone is (and I got a sore arm if I wrote for too long!), but for keeping in touch and short messages it worked really well. The scribble feature that lets you doodle what you want to write is a major improvement from the initial ways to compose messages.

And for some of the things I needed to do (eg paying, listening to stuff and tracking activity) I find the Watch vastly superior to the phone because I can now carry one less thing.

The newer Watches are also much, much faster than the original one. So my reservations about that are happily a thing of the past.

The big draw back was battery life. Normally I comfortably get a couple of days between charges, but I hadn’t properly accounted for how much more quickly it would drain if I was on 4G all day rather than tethered to my phone. I started with a full charge and was in the mid-80% range by the time I started my first meeting. And I found that I needed to do some quite aggressive power management to last the day (including switching off data when I didn’t need it, using theatre mode to stop the screen waking up when I lifted my wrist and turning it off altogether for a couple of hours when I had a laptop to hand). It kept going until seconds after I’d made my last tap out at the station this evening * and then gave up the ghost. A close run thing!

Overall, I think I’m happy to revise my original view and strongly recommend the Watch, even if you’re not as much of a gadget enthusiast as I am. ** But I don’t think it’s wise to give up the smartphone just yet, unless you’re fairly comfortable going off grid and / or are happy to carry a charger for top ups when needed. That’ll change though and I reckon that it seems increasingly likely that we’ll find ourselves using smartphones a bit less frequently and wearable computing more often in the years ahead. Food for thought…

* This is important because Transport for London don’t automatically match the card number used for Apple Pay on a phone or Watch with the number of the physical debit card that I had with me as a contingency (the card numbers are different even though they link to the same account). So if I had had to tap out with the debit card instead of the Watch I’d have been charged much more than the correct fare for my journey.

** And yes, there are other brands of wearable. I’ve not tried those but I spot more and more people sporting them so I’m confident that there’s something for most tastes now.