Apple Watch Review

The Apple Watch is an extraordinarily small and personal device. It is designed to participate in nearly every moment of your day, but almost never directly interact with anyone else. It knows when you’re wearing it. You can talk to it. You can poke it — and it can poke back.

Every so often, the Apple Watch thinks about your heartbeat.

But the Apple Watch is also an enormous device. It’s the first entirely new Apple product in five years, and the first Apple product developed after the death of Steve Jobs. It’s full of new hardware, new software, and entirely new ideas about how the worlds of fashion and technology should intersect.

It’s also the first smartwatch that might legitimately become a mainstream product, even as competitors flood the market. Apple has the marketing prowess, the retail store network, and the sheer determination to actually make this thing happen.

It just has to answer one question: would you actually use the Apple Watch instead of your phone?


Walk It Off
Notifications, Music, Apple Pay
Fashion Technology
Featuring Racked
Lost in the Meeting Zone
Messaging, Siri, Digital Touch
Business Time
Apps and Performance
Work It Out
Health, Fitness, Activity Tracker
Twilight of Attention
Featuring Eater
Back to Base
Battery Life, Thoughts, Feelings
Credits

The Apple Watch is an extraordinarily small and personal device. It is designed to participate in nearly every moment of your day, but almost never directly interact with anyone else. It knows when you’re wearing it. You can talk to it. You can poke it — and it can poke back.

Every so often, the Apple Watch thinks about your heartbeat.

But the Apple Watch is also an enormous device. It’s the first entirely new Apple product in five years, and the first Apple product developed after the death of Steve Jobs. It’s full of new hardware, new software, and entirely new ideas about how the worlds of fashion and technology should intersect.

It’s also the first smartwatch that might legitimately become a mainstream product, even as competitors flood the market. Apple has the marketing prowess, the retail store network, and the sheer determination to actually make this thing happen.

It just has to answer one question: would you actually use the Apple Watch instead of your phone?


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HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

Let’s just get this out of the way: the Apple Watch, as I reviewed it for the past week and a half, is kind of slow. There’s no getting around it, no way to talk about all of its interface ideas and obvious potential and hints of genius without noting that sometimes it stutters loading notifications. Sometimes pulling location information and data from your iPhone over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi takes a long time. Sometimes apps take forever to load, and sometimes third-party apps never really load at all. Sometimes it’s just unresponsive for a few seconds while it thinks and then it comes back.


Apple tells me that upcoming software updates will address these performance issues, but for right now, they’re there, and they’re what I’ve been thinking about every morning as I get ready for work. Wearing a smartwatch like the Apple Watch is a far deeper commitment than carrying a smartphone in your pocket; you are literally putting the technology on your body and allowing it to touch and measure you while you display it to the rest of the world. Committing to technology that’s a little slow to respond to you is dicey at best, especially when it’s supposed to step in for your phone. If the Watch is slow, I’m going to pull out my phone. But if I keep pulling out my phone, I’ll never use the Watch. So I have resolved to wait it out.

I’m putting my phone in my pocket and this Watch on my wrist, and we’re taking this trip together.

These mornings have been full of self-reflection, moody contemplation as I gather my screens of all sizes and pack them in a bag, work alerts flashing across an array of devices that are all less important than my phone. I love my phone. Everyone loves their phone. The only real question a smartwatch like the Apple Watch needs to answer is “why would I use this instead of my phone?” The answers so far haven’t been apparent; the Watch seems like it can do a little bit of everything instead of one thing really well. So I’m putting my phone in my pocket and this Watch on my wrist, and we’re taking this trip together.

We are going to need more coffee.

As an object, it makes sense that the Watch is not nearly as cold and minimal as Apple’s recent phones and tablets and laptops. It has to be warmer, cozier. It has to invite you to touch it and take it with you all the time. Take the bands off and it’s a little miracle of technology and engineering and manufacturing, a dense package containing more sensors and processing power than anyone could have even dreamed a few decades ago. It’s a supercomputer on your wrist, but it’s also a bulbous, friendly little thing, far more round than I expected, recalling nothing quite so much as the first-generation iPhone. It is unbelievably high tech and a little bit silly, a masterpiece of engineering with a Mickey Mouse face. It is quintessentially Apple.

It’s also surprisingly heavy. I noticed when I was wearing it, and everyone who held it commented on the weight. That might simply be a function of how unfamiliar watches have become; my stainless steel Apple Watch with leather loop band weighs 2.9 ounces, which is more than my plastic Nixon’s 1.7 ounces or the 1.8-ounce Moto 360, but much less than my 5-ounce Baume and Mercier. All in all, the Apple Watch isn’t light enough to fade away, but it’s also not so heavy that it’s a distraction.

On the right side of the Watch you’ll find the Digital Crown scroll wheel and a dedicated button (the official name is just “side button”) that opens your favorites list with one tap and activates Apple Pay with two taps. This side button is extraordinarily confusing — it looks and feels so much like an iPhone sleep / wake button that I still hit it to turn the screen on and off, even though I know I’m doing the wrong thing.

On the back of the Watch, there’s a slight dome that holds the optical heart rate sensor and the inductive charging system. You’ll also find a pair of buttons that release the watchbands. They’re flush with the case but relatively easy to depress, and the bands slide right out. You can make the Watch work in basically any orientation you’d like by flipping the screen with a setting in the iPhone app — a boon for the left-handed. It’s a fairly simple system, so expect to see tons of third-party Watch bands; Apple says it has no problem with that.


Apple Pay is my favorite feature on the Watch.
Apple gave me three bands to play with: the leather loop, the Milanese loop, and the white sport band. I mostly stuck with the leather loop, which feels more like plastic than leather but which I found super comfortable because it was so easy to readjust throughout the day. The white sport band basically felt like any other plastic band I’ve worn. I felt ridiculous wearing the Milanese Loop, so I didn’t.

The face of the Watch curves up off the sides, leaving a noticeable air gap above the display underneath. But besides that small complaint, the display is simply terrific. It carries the same Retina branding as the iPhone display and it delivers, with imperceptible pixels and inky blacks that allow the screen to blend right into the curved sides of the glass. It’s easily the best smartwatch display on the market, and it would be unassailable if not for the air gap. It’s light-years beyond everything else.


The back of the Watch is arguably more beautiful than the front.
ON YOUR WRIST
Once you actually start living with the Watch, it quickly becomes clear that there are three main ways to actually use the thing: the watch face, the app launcher, and the communications app.

Apple is insistent that one of the main functions of the Watch is simply to be a great watch, so when you raise your wrist, you’ll see the time by default, just like a regular watch. The lone exception out of the box is the workout app, which Apple says is “sticky” so people can check their exercise stats quickly at the gym.

In the first of many moments where the Watch felt underpowered, I found that the screen lit up a couple of ticks too slowly: I’d raise my wrist, wait a beat, and then the screen would turn on. This sounds like a minor quibble, but in the context of a watch you’re glancing at dozens of times a day, it’s quickly distracting. Other smartwatches like the Pebble and the LG G Watch R simply leave their screens on all the time; having a screen that constantly flips on and off is definitely behind the curve.

TELLING TIME
The main watch face really is a complete self-contained experience: if the Apple Watch had no other functionality except for what you can do from the watch face, it would still be competitive. Customizing the watch Face is the first time you’ll use Force Touch: you push a little bit harder on the screen, and you can swipe between Apple’s selection of watch face templates, each of which can be customized and saved as individual variations. Most of the templates are minor riffs on the same basic analog watch, but others are very strange indeed, like the animated butterfly and jellyfish. There’s no particularly great digital face, and there’s no ability to load up your own watch faces or buy new ones from the store, which is a clearly missed opportunity.

If the Apple Watch had no other functionality except for what you can do from the watch face, it would still be competitive.

The Watch app is literally the most central experience on the Watch — you can rearrange every app icon on the homescreen except the Watch icon, which is always in the middle. What’s fascinating and somewhat confusing is that so many of the Watch’s core abilities are only in the Watch app, so interface ideas you learn there don’t work anywhere else.

For example, the Watch app is the only place to access notifications after they appear. Notifications are the most important part of any smartwatch experience, but on the Apple Watch you can only swipe down to see your notifications when you’re on the watch face. Once you click the Digital Crown and open the app launcher, the notification drawer goes away entirely and swiping down does nothing. Same with Glances, which are essentially single-screen status updates from various apps you access by swiping up from the Watch app. They’re a major piece of the Watch experience, but they disappear everywhere else in the operating system. These are radically different interface patterns than iOS, where you can access the notification center and control center from virtually everywhere, and it makes navigating the Watch interface more confusing until you get it.

The Law of Wearable Success
In order to be successful, any given piece of wearable technology has to be useful the entire time it’s on your body. Prescription glasses sit on your face, but improve your vision all the time, so they’re successful. Sunglasses sit on your face and make you look cooler all the time, so they’re successful. Google Glass sits on your face, but mostly does nothing, so it’s a failure. It’s a simple formula.
Understanding that the Watch app is an entire primary experience unto itself is the key to understanding what happens when you press either of the buttons on the side of the Watch — they launch the other two main Watch experiences. Pressing the side button takes you to a totally unique contacts screen, which is where you send the ephemeral Digital Touch messages. Clicking the Digital Crown on the watch face opens the honeycomb app launcher, which is where you can open the various other apps on the Watch.

All of this sounds complex, but you’re not really supposed to use it all at once — the aim is for the Watch to shine in 10- 15-second burst throughout the day, not in extended usage sessions. And that was borne out every morning, because I didn’t have any reason to wear the Watch until I left the house.

I was half-hoping to put on the Watch in the morning and use it instead of my phone, but that didn’t happen. I grab my phone first thing in the morning and use it nonstop to prepare for the day: I organize my calendar, catch up on The Verge, check Twitter, and bang out replies on Slack and email. None of this is even possible to do on the Watch. Apple spent tons of effort and millions of dollars promoting the iPad as a business and creation platform instead of just a consumption machine, but there’s no fighting the tiny display and limited input options of the Watch — this thing is all about quickly glancing at information, not really doing anything with it.

It becomes far more valuable once you’re on the move.

Modest Updates: Nikon D3400 Review

The D3400 is a very modestly updated version of the D3300. It's an entry level DSLR targeted toward first-time ILC shooters and those who are ready to move on from their smartphones to a more advanced shooting platform.

The camera is built around the same 24MP APS-C CMOS sensor found in its predecessor along with an 'EXPEED 4' image processor, Full HD video capture and an 11-point autofocus system. Unfortunately the camera doesn't have Wi-Fi, but it does have Bluetooth LE connectivity for transferring images from the camera to a smart phone via the 'SnapBridge' app.

Nikon packs a lot of very desirable features into the D3400 for the price.
In terms of competition, the D3400's sits between the Canon Rebel T6 and the Canon Rebel T6i. The D3400's $649 launch price for a kit with the new AF-P 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 VR lens puts it between the $549 list price of for the T6/EOS 1300D kit and the significantly more expensive $899 MSRP for the T6i with the 18-55mm VR zoom. The T6 has a lower resolution, 18MP sensor but its lower price makes it a threat at this price-sensitive point in the market.

Specs Comparison

The table below illustrates that not much has changed from the D3300 to the D3400. The biggest changes seen in the D3400 are in battery life (which we suspect is due to the less powerful flash), weight and the new built in Bluetooth LE that works with SnapBridge to enable photo sharing. The D3400 also tends to come kitted with a new 'AF-P' version of the 18-55mm VR lens which uses a new focus motor to offer improved performance in live view and video.

For beginning DSLR shooters the elimination of the external mic port (if video is important to you) and, more notably, the Ultrasonic Sensor Cleaning from the D3400 is something to definitely keep in mind when deciding which camera to purchase.

If you're not wedded to the idea of owning a DSLR, the Fujifilm X-A3 (which features an articulating touchscreen LCD, better AF coverage, and twin control dials), and the Sony a5100 (which acts more in the way of a point and shoot, but still offers impressive features and AF coverage), are both mirrorless cameras. These offer excellent features and image quality in a much smaller package. These are definitely two other options to also consider looking at before making a purchase.

It is worth noting that the traditional DSLR still holds some key advantages over mirrorless rivals. They offer much better battery life and lens selection, for example. The optical viewfinder is another important factor for many photographers. For more on the subject, read our primer.