To relate my first impressions of my Apple Watch (folks keep asking).  I bought the Stainless Steel one with a Classic Black Strap.

The experience in the Apple Store was a bit too focussed on changing the clock face design; the experience of using it, for accepting the default face to start with, and using it for real, is (so far) much more pleasant. But take it off the charger, put it on, and you get:

Tap in your pin, then the watch face is there:

There’s actually a small (virtual) red/blue LED just above the “60” atop the clock – red if a notification has come in, turning into a blue padlock if you still need to enter your PIN, but otherwise what you see here. London Time, 9 degrees centigrade, 26th day of the current month, and my next calendar appointment underneath.

For notifications it feels deserving of my attention, it not only lights the LED (which I only get so see if I flick my wrist up to see the watch face), but it also goes tap-tap-tap on my wrist. This optionally also sounds a small warning, but that’s something I switched off pretty early on. The taptic hint is nice, quiet and quite subtle.

Most of the set-up for apps and settings is done on the Apple iPhone you have paired up to the watch. Apps reside on the phone, and ones you already have that can talk to your watch are listed already. You can then select which ones you want to appear on the watches application screen, and a subset you want to have as “glances” for faster access. The structure looks something like this:

   

 

Hence, swipe down from the top, you see the notification stream, swipe back up, you’re back to the clock face. Swipe up from the bottom, you get the last “glance” you looked at. In my case, I was every now and then seeing how my (long term buy and hold) shares in Amazon were doing after they announced the size of their Web Services division. The currently selected glance stays in place for next time I swipe up unless I leave the screen having moved along that row.

If I swipe from left to right, or right to left, I step over different “glances”. These behave like swiping between icon screens on an iPhone or iPad; if you want more detail, you can click on them to invoke the matching application. I have around 12 of these in place at the moment. Once done, swipe back up, and back to the clock face again. After around 6 seconds, the screen blacks out – until the next time you swing the watch face back into view, at which point it lights up again. Works well.

You’ll see it’s monitoring my heart rate, and measuring my movement. But in the meantime, if I want to call or message someone, I can hit the small button on the side and get a list of 12 commonly called friends:

Move the crown around, click the picture, and I can call or iMessage them directly. Text or voice clip. Yes, directly on the watch, even if my iPhone is upstairs or atop the cookery books in the kitchen; it has a microphone and a speaker, and works from anywhere over local WiFi. I can even see who is phoning me and take their calls on the watch.

If I need to message anyone else, I can press the crown button in and summon Siri; the accuracy of Siri is remarkable now. One of my sons sent an iMessage to me when I was sitting outside the Pharmacy in Boots, and I gave a full sentence reply (verbally) then told it to send – 100% accurately despite me largely whispering into the watch on my wrist. Must have looked strange.

There are applications on the watch but these are probably a less used edge case; in my case, the view on my watch looks just like the layout i’ve given in the iPhone Watch app:

So, I can jump in to invoke apps that aren’t set as glances. My only surprise so far was finding that FaceBook haven’t yet released their Watch or Messenger apps, though Instagram (which they also own) is there already. Eh, tap tap on my wrist to tell me Paula Radcliffe had just completed her last London Marathon:

and a bit later:

Oh dear, what a shame, how sad (smirk – Aston Villa fan typing). But if there’s a flurry of notifications, and you just want to clear the lot off in one fell swoop, just hard press the screen and…

Tap the X and zap, all gone.

There are a myriad of useful apps; I have Dark Sky (which gives you a hyper local forecast of any impending rain), City Mapper (helps direct you around London on all different forms of Transport available), Uber, and several others. They are there in the application icons, but also enabled from the Watch app on my phone (Apps, then the subset selected as Glances):

 

With that, tap tap on my wrist:

Hmmm – i’ve been sitting for too long, so time to get off my arse. It will also assess my exercise in the day and give me some targets to achieve – which it’ll then display for later admiration. Or disgust.

There is more to come. I can already call a Uber taxi directly from the watch. The BBC News Glance rotates the few top stories if selected. Folks in the USA can already use it to pay at any NFC cash terminal with a single click (if the watch comes off your wrist, it senses this and will insist on a PIN then). Twitter gives notifications and has a glance that reports the top trend hashtag when viewed.

So far, the battery is only getting from 100% down to 30% in regular use from 6:00am in the morning until 11:30pm at night, so looking good. Boy, those Amazon shares are going up; that’ll pay for my watch many times over:

Overall, impressed so far, very happy with it, and i’m sure the start of a world where software steps submerge into a world of simple notifications and responses to same. And i’m sure Jane (my wife) will want one soon. Just have to wean her out of her desire for the £10,000+ gold one to match her gold coloured MacBook.