The One Feature that Will Determine the Quality of the Apple Watch
The Apple Watch has to be smart about filtering out the noise. Photo: Reuters
Apple wants you to think of the Apple Watch
as many things: a messaging tool, a fitness tracker, a phone, a fashion
item, a boarding pass for your flight, even a key to your hotel room.
But the most accurate description for the $349-and-way-up gadget Apple introduced at an event Monday (read our liveblog, see Apple’s video) is a tad more prosaic: Like other smartwatches, it’s an external display for your phone.
Too Much Information
We
might need such a thing because we have too many things going on in our
phones already. Incoming e-mails, new text messages, Facebook updates,
Twitter replies, app-update alerts… and unless we have our phones in our
hands, only a handful of different beeps and buzzes distinguish these
different notifications.
(And if the phone is in a purse, forget even that.)
The part of wearing a smartphone that I’ve decided I like is having that always-visible second screen. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said Monday when he introduced the Apple Watch: “It’s not just with you, it’s on you.”
Instead
of wondering if the phone vibrating with an important message or just
another daily deal ad, each new update flashes on a watch’s screen. You
don’t have to do anything next: In the smartwatches I’ve tried, it goes
away after a few moments. Or you can open the email to learn more or
swipe it off the screen to dismiss it.
In
essence, the smartwatch lets you perform digital triage on all of these
potential interruptions. It lets you save your phone for things that
require actual responses, or at least ones beyond a smartwatch’s
text-to-speech capabilities.
The built-in apps on the Apple Watch, like the core suite of apps in Google’s Android Wear, appear to cater to that scenario. Good.
The Apple Watch Must Be Choosy
But
after spending a few months with two Android Wear watches, I realized
that enough wasn’t nearly enough—that going from constantly checking my
phone to constantly checking a watch wasn’t always an upgrade and could
be its own form of rudeness.
You
can cut down on this info pollution by changing the notification
settings on your phone and watch. But those gadgets also should be able
to figure out what’s important to you. If they can’t, they just become
distractions or, worse, annoyances.
Look
at e-mail. Flagging or starring messages for follow-up has become a
standard feature. Apple also lets you mark some correspondents as “VIPs”
whose messages surface in their own folder. And you can use filters or
third-party services (like my friend Jared Goralnick’s AwayFind) to highlight mail from particular people or with set subjects.
Do any of those signals help to regulate what I’ve seen on the faces of smart watches? Not as much as I’d like.
Too many notifications on an Android Wear watch. (Photo: Rob Pegoraro)
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