How to use with iPhone
Apple Watch is your iPhone’s best friend. Here’s why…
The first wearable gadget from Apple beams messages, Facebook updates and simplified apps to our wrists, eliminating the all-too-common need to take out our Apple devices to constantly check notifications. The Watch and the iPhone are intimately connected and should be considered as one system together. There are more than a dozen ways to interact with the Watch, from receiving glanceable notifications, to feeling ‘taptic’ feedback, to summoning Siri, according to the WatchKit documentation for developers.
It’s becoming inconvenient to pocket the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and even bigger 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus in your jeans, or to always stow the thin, but tall 9.7-inch iPad Air 2 in a bag, so the Watch is designed to be your ‘always on’ notification friend.
Is that phone call from a telemarketer not worth your time or an emergency from a loved one? Apple Watch makes mundane notifications easy to dismiss while keeping you in the loop with important alerts. There will be loads of Apple Watch apps available on launch day (24 April) by the sounds of it, but they don’t really have their very own space. You’ll browse through, use and download all Watch apps from your iPhone rather than directly on the Watch itself. Meaning, you shouldn’t think about the Watch as a separate device but more of an iPhone companion.
We’ve known for a while that Watch apps don’t run entirely independently and are highly reliant on a connection to an iPhone. That’s another confirmation that your Apple Watch is not going to be much use if you take it too far away from your iPhone – at least not yet.
Some of the apps Tim Cook and other key Apple figures showed off during the Apple Watch event in March included Uber, WeChat, Instagram, Shazam and a home security monitor. Expect to see these plus a boatload of others, including plenty of dross, come the summer. Don’t expect anything too in-depth, though. Apple’s Vice President of Techology, Kevin Lynch, says most of the Watch’s applications are “really about brief interactions… many of these are just a few seconds long”, reinforcing that Watch is more of a companion device than your phone is.