Apple Watch

The Apple Watch is the tech giant’s first new product category in five years. The obvious question is whether it can make an impact as great as that of 2010’s marketchanging iPad. Early sales have been strong, but it remains to be seen whether Apple’s influence will be enough to reinvent the wearable market, and make it mainstream.

Design

The Apple Watch is beautifully designed and engineered, with a great look and feel. Its chunky body is faintly reminiscent of – although much smaller than – the original iPhone, yet simultaneously modernlooking. The Apple Watch is also comfortable on the wrist.

Three designs are available – Apple Watch, Apple Watch Sport and Apple Watch Edition. Each of these is available in two wrist sizes – 38- and 42mm.

The underside of the watch is convex: it bulges outwards slightly. The watch will still sit pretty flat, with that curved section pressing slightly into your wrist, but there will be gaps between the skin and watch/strap at the top and bottom of the watch’s body. This effect is more pronounced with the 42mm model, and will also vary from person to person.

We found that the Apple Watch was heavier to wear than our old traditional watch, but we quickly got used to it; and to be honest, it’s not as heavy as we expected.

Other than the touchscreen, you can interact with the Apple Watch via two hardware controls. There’s a largish protruding dial on the righthand side of the watch, which Apple calls the Digital Crown; this echoes the design of traditional watch crowns, and can be turned to scroll through onscreen options, or pressed to switch on the screen, confirm a choice or go to the Home screen. There’s also a side button underneath the Digital Crown, which calls up your favourite contacts for quick calls and texts, and also lets you power off the device.

The Apple Watch is rated as water- and splash-resistant to the IPX7 standard, which means it should survive in water up to a depth of one metre for up to 30 minutes. Wearing it in the shower is therefore fine, but Apple officially advises against taking your watch swimming, even though plenty of people have done exactly that.

Display

The 38mm Apple Watch has a 1.32in screen with a resolution of 272x340 pixels, while the 42mm model’s 1.5in screen is 312x390. Both models therefore have a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch: that’s sharp, with no visible pixellation. It’s also pleasingly bright and vividly colourful.

The touchscreen aspects work well too: the Apple Watch is highly responsive, and after a little testing we found we preferred to swipe through screens even when a scrolling option was available via the Digital Crown.

The display also is able to determine how hard you touch the screen. It can distinguish between a regular tap, used to select things, and a harder press (or Force Touch), used to access contextual menus.

User interface

While scrolling is smooth and the touchscreen responsive, there are so many ways to trigger particular actions that some testers have found it a bit complicated. It’s not always clear whether you should tap, scroll, swipe or push.

The watch will notify you when you receive emails from VIPs, text messages, and other information on your iPhone. It does this with a sound effect, much like an iPhone, but it also ‘taps’ you on the wrist. These taps feel peculiar until you get used to them, but they do their job: they’re difficult to ignore.

You can control the Apple Watch using Siri, which will switch on when you press and hold the Digital Crown or use the command: “Hey Siri”. You can place calls, set alarms, ask for directions, check football scores and cinema listings, and launch apps.

Voice control is also an option when responding to a text, if you don’t want to choose from the list of pre-written replies. Siri will attempt to convert your speech into a written reply – which isn’t always perfect, but in quiet surroundings we’ve been generally impressed by its accuracy. Alternatively, you can just send the unconverted audio.

The Apple Watch runs apps, much as the iPhone and iPad do, but these are heavily cut down for the miniature interface. Apple has shrunk down some of the most common apps, including Messages, Mail, Weather, Calendar, Maps, Passbook, Music and Photos, and there’s already a wide range of third-party apps. The watch can’t, however, run Safari.