I just bought the Series 5 Nike edition. I’m really, really dissappointed. I can’t believe how bad the user experience is to me, compared to other Apple products. The watch is borderline unusable.
What they call an ”always-on display” is in fact a dimmed-out time display, when an app is running. With sunglasses on, I can’t see it almost at all. What I expected was an actual always-on display, with the content of the app I’m running visible.
Detecting the wrist movement does not work that well. When I’m riding a bike, I really have to try hard to make it detect the wrist movement to turn the ”always-on display” back on. And I can’t tap it with the gloves on, because it needs a finger for tapping! What’s that about, it has a movement detection, so why can’t I just tap the watch with gloves on?
It often shuts down apps. For instance, I’m using Sports Tracker to track an excercise. When I pause the training, it might randomly decide to just move it to background, stopping the excercise and deleting it. Number one rule for software is to my understanding, ”never ever delete user’s content unless requested”. Apple’s background garbage cleaner seems to work against that rule. Three times in two days I have lost an excercise, with two different apps I’ve tried. Seems a lot like the old days of iPad, when you lost stuff all the time because of garbage cleaning. I don’t know if the apps are handling the data wrong, but after all these years, it should just work.
The display is really dim. Even the brightest setting is way too dim for my taste. And it’s small. I have the 44mm version, and it’s very small compared to my other watches, which are by no means large in the world of watches. I think there should be a much, much bigger option available. That would also help with the battery, which is probably the cause for most of these issues.
These are the showstoppers for me, but there’s a number of other issues that are mostly just annoying. I don’t care about the activity tracking or any of the all-day usage functions. I would never consider using the Apple watch all-day, because I have other watches. For my purposes, I needed it for training and sleep tracking.
I considered getting a training watch, but was tempted by the Apple ecosystem, because I’m pretty deep in it. My mistake was that I believed it could compete with a purpose-built training watch like a Suunto, Garmin or Polar. After two days of use, I’ll probably just return it and get a proper training watch.
What they call an ”always-on display” is in fact a dimmed-out time display, when an app is running. With sunglasses on, I can’t see it almost at all. What I expected was an actual always-on display, with the content of the app I’m running visible.
Detecting the wrist movement does not work that well. When I’m riding a bike, I really have to try hard to make it detect the wrist movement to turn the ”always-on display” back on. And I can’t tap it with the gloves on, because it needs a finger for tapping! What’s that about, it has a movement detection, so why can’t I just tap the watch with gloves on?
It often shuts down apps. For instance, I’m using Sports Tracker to track an excercise. When I pause the training, it might randomly decide to just move it to background, stopping the excercise and deleting it. Number one rule for software is to my understanding, ”never ever delete user’s content unless requested”. Apple’s background garbage cleaner seems to work against that rule. Three times in two days I have lost an excercise, with two different apps I’ve tried. Seems a lot like the old days of iPad, when you lost stuff all the time because of garbage cleaning. I don’t know if the apps are handling the data wrong, but after all these years, it should just work.
The display is really dim. Even the brightest setting is way too dim for my taste. And it’s small. I have the 44mm version, and it’s very small compared to my other watches, which are by no means large in the world of watches. I think there should be a much, much bigger option available. That would also help with the battery, which is probably the cause for most of these issues.
These are the showstoppers for me, but there’s a number of other issues that are mostly just annoying. I don’t care about the activity tracking or any of the all-day usage functions. I would never consider using the Apple watch all-day, because I have other watches. For my purposes, I needed it for training and sleep tracking.
I considered getting a training watch, but was tempted by the Apple ecosystem, because I’m pretty deep in it. My mistake was that I believed it could compete with a purpose-built training watch like a Suunto, Garmin or Polar. After two days of use, I’ll probably just return it and get a proper training watch.
