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The Quest for Quality: Five of the Most Useful Apple Watch Apps

Wow! Another iDevice to buy Things for.... Now that is a great business model they got going there.
 
thirteen1031 said:
My husband got the Apple Watch and has been doing the opposite. He's put away his smartphone and is using the watch almost exclusively (phone calls excepted). He loves (LOVES LOVES LOVES!) that it's helping him escape from always checking his phone and feeling that he has to answer every text, every email.

So. Sorry you don't get it...but you don't. and maybe that's because you don't have the Apple Watch but that other one. Or not. But there you go. Some of us do get it.
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This is happening to me as well. It's made me much less likely to walk around like a smartphone zombie sucked in by my phone all the time. When my phone was my sole device I would be inclined to take it out regularly to see if I had missed a notification/message/whatever and then most times I would also feel compelled to check twitter, instagram, reddit, etc. since I already had the phone out. Now I know that I won't miss notifications and so my phone only comes out when needed, or when I have time to kill. My daily phone usage has been cut down by about 50%.
 
usarioclave said:
You know, if you have an Apple Watch there's no reason not to go full dork. It's not like people don't notice it.
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Oh I agree. I was just saying if someone thinks it's too geeky to use a calculator on a watch and suggests talking to it instead I'm not sure how they don't think that would be too dorky by that same line of thought.
 
name99 said:
The general consensus is that the phrase "must have device" is utterly meaningless. There is NOT "must have device" unless, perhaps, you're referring to a pacemaker.
No-one will die without a computer or phone --- or without a house or without books or without nice clothes.

So the point is not "must-have", it's "does it provide value for money". And that is a VERY subjective thing, not just in terms of value, but in terms of "for money". I have no idea what you spend your money on, or how much you make. Will it provide more cumulative pleasure than two(?) visits to your local hooker, or four visits to a Broadway show, or eight(?) nights of drunkenness, or eight mid-range nice items of clothing?

What I do know is that someone making grand pronouncements about the spending desires of every America, let alone every world citizen, clearly is talking out his a**.
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You hang one of these from your car don't you.
eV3VJ.jpg


It was a nice story, but stop taking things too literally.
 
I think the Apple watch is still a gimmick, and more of a toy than a tool. I used to feel the same way about the iPad, though. My opinion changed as the iPad became a more mature product (a few months after the iPad 2 was released was about when I accepted it as a 'useful buy'). I have an iPad 3, and for me, it's still more of a toy/media tool than it is a tool for productivity... but I don't look at it like it's fluff, even though there was a time that I did.

With that all said, as things currently stand, I think the Apple watch is fluff. There's not enough battery life, and 99% of the apps I have seen just don't make sense. When I'm wearing a regular mechanical watch, I tend to pull my phone out to check the time instead of tilting my wrist to look at the time. If my phone contends for convenience at that level, how could these miniaturized apps for the watch contend with their full-sized counterparts on my phone? I think it will take more than just one iteration of the Apple watch to cycle through before the tech becomes more than just fluff. Right now, I would prefer something along the lines of a Fitbit over an Apple watch: It would wake me up when I want, track my sleep, have a pedometer, check time, etc... all I want, all I need out of a watch, better battery life, and straight to the point.

Something that would amaze me (and immediately make me want to buy one of these watches)... which just isn't possible right now... is if you could fit a significant amount of storage onto the watch (1TB or more), and essentially use it as a wireless (fast) USB drive. Just not really feasible right now. I'm sure there's some other great things the watch will do one day. However, one last thing that would impress me is if the thing didn't need to be charged every single day.
 
macduke said:
I'm excited to have Calcbot on my wrist! I've always wanted a calculator watch but they looked so horrible.
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I laugh about this as I think about the Casio TC-600 I had in HS back in the 80s...

But yeah, this is revolutionary....
 
I only hope the apps can be more independent of the phone in the future.

The other day I went out running in shorts with no pockets. Drove over to the grocery store afterward and thought I would leave my phone in the car and use the grocery list in clear on my phone. Once I got in the store, clear couldn't load the list because my phone wasn't in range.

At least I can use my watch for running without my phone. That alone has been worth the price of admission.

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PaulWog said:
When I'm wearing a regular mechanical watch, I tend to pull my phone out to check the time instead of tilting my wrist to look at the time.
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So why do you bother wearing a watch in the first place? I'm not trying to be a jerk, just curious. If I wear a watch, I'm sure not gonna pull out my phone to check the time.
 
ScottHammet said:
No *****. That's exactly what I was thinking..."Quit showing me all the amazing and wonderful things I could be doing with the WATCH I DON'T YET HAVE!".

How about a useful story on what's being done to address the backlog of missing 42mm SS w/ SSLB watches? How about a nice graph or something that summarizes all of the reports of who ordered their watch when and whether or not they've gotten theirs? Lord knows there's enough data in the Forums for one of the MacRumors interns to build a us a pretty graph.
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Seems like people stopped updating their order status, I ordered the same watch, I just got my extra band today but the watch still in process status

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/teX78N5Hs3Sj4xrqk11mE7Q/htmlview?pli=1
 
I loved this bit:

"Perhaps the most useful functionality of Calcbot for Apple Watch is the tip calculator, which allows you to enter the total cost of your bill, calculate a 10% to 30% tip and divide the amount between up to 10 people if necessary."

Are people really not able to look at a bill, add on a tip of roughly 15 % and divide it by the number of people at their table in their heads? I would feel a total moron prodding and poking at my watch like that after a meal. I would certainly think that of anyone else doing it. And that is "Perhaps the most useful functionality of Calcbot..."?

All I keep seeing is evidence of people trying desperately to invent things the watch is useful for. Not impressed...
 
PaulWog said:
I think the Apple watch is still a gimmick, and more of a toy than a tool. I used to feel the same way about the iPad, though. My opinion changed as the iPad became a more mature product (a few months after the iPad 2 was released was about when I accepted it as a 'useful buy'). I have an iPad 3, and for me, it's still more of a toy/media tool than it is a tool for productivity... but I don't look at it like it's fluff, even though there was a time that I did.

With that all said, as things currently stand, I think the Apple watch is fluff. There's not enough battery life, and 99% of the apps I have seen just don't make sense. When I'm wearing a regular mechanical watch, I tend to pull my phone out to check the time instead of tilting my wrist to look at the time. If my phone contends for convenience at that level, how could these miniaturized apps for the watch contend with their full-sized counterparts on my phone? I think it will take more than just one iteration of the Apple watch to cycle through before the tech becomes more than just fluff. Right now, I would prefer something along the lines of a Fitbit over an Apple watch: It would wake me up when I want, track my sleep, have a pedometer, check time, etc... all I want, all I need out of a watch, better battery life, and straight to the point.

Something that would amaze me (and immediately make me want to buy one of these watches)... which just isn't possible right now... is if you could fit a significant amount of storage onto the watch (1TB or more), and essentially use it as a wireless (fast) USB drive. Just not really feasible right now. I'm sure there's some other great things the watch will do one day. However, one last thing that would impress me is if the thing didn't need to be charged every single day.
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What really bothers me is that they struck out on the health side of things (heart rate monitor, big whoop) and then they tried to turn it into a fashion accessory, pretending like it was planned all along. So disappointing. Glance apps are cool and I am sure really helpful, but it wasn't the game changer I was hoping for - yet anyways.
 
Apps

Why is Spotify not on it yet?

I was going to use the watch for Gym but having spotify lets me access many songs as compared to getting them on my watch and then playing it.
 
hummus said:
This is happening to me as well. It's made me much less likely to walk around like a smartphone zombie sucked in by my phone all the time. When my phone was my sole device I would be inclined to take it out regularly to see if I had missed a notification/message/whatever and then most times I would also feel compelled to check twitter, instagram, reddit, etc. since I already had the phone out. Now I know that I won't miss notifications and so my phone only comes out when needed, or when I have time to kill. My daily phone usage has been cut down by about 50%.
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:D Thank you for posting this! Apple stated that this was one of the things they focused on when creating the Watch (i.e to make people less reliant on their phones), but it seems to have gone in one ear and out the other given a lot of comments I see here.

This is why I said that the other smart watch might be the reason why the person isn't getting the appeal of the Apple watch. It may seem like the two smart watches aren't that different from each other, but Apple's was created with the aim to make it easier to keep the phone in one's pocket or purse. To cut down, as you said, phone zombie-ism. From the reviews I'm reading, they've succeeded in that. So something about the Apple Watch has to be different from the other smart watch if it's getting people to look at the watch not their phone, rather than losing interest in the watch and going back to their phone.

Just sayin' ;)
 
thisisdallas said:
My favorites are

1. Lifesum - Really nice and streamlined dietary/water/activity tracker. Has a bug with the activity portion and the watch, but the design of the watch app and phone app are unbeatable

2. New York Times - Love the summary stories with the save for later feature. The breaking news notifications are also really nice.

3. Dark Sky - Tells the weather in a cute and nice way?

4. HoursTracker - I loooooove not having to take my phone out to clock in at work anymore. So convenient. App is ugly and buggy on the watch, but it works almost always, so I'm not complaining just yet given the lack of testing able to be done.

5. Lark - Personal trainer/dietician on your wrist. Really easy to use and almost nicer on the watch than on the phone. If anyone is looking for a great food/sleep/activity tracker that requires very minimal effort, here's your app

And of course the 5 mentioned by MR are also really really nice (especially Things)
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Thanks! What's better, Lifesum or Lark? Seems redundant to use both.
 
CausticSoda said:
I loved this bit:

"Perhaps the most useful functionality of Calcbot for Apple Watch is the tip calculator, which allows you to enter the total cost of your bill, calculate a 10% to 30% tip and divide the amount between up to 10 people if necessary."

Are people really not able to look at a bill, add on a tip of roughly 15 % and divide it by the number of people at their table in their heads? I would feel a total moron prodding and poking at my watch like that after a meal. I would certainly think that of anyone else doing it. And that is "Perhaps the most useful functionality of Calcbot..."?

All I keep seeing is evidence of people trying desperately to invent things the watch is useful for. Not impressed...
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You are wrong, normal people, not geeks like us, can't even figure out 2% of something. It sounds crazy but its true. None of my 6 servers can do it in their head they have to ask me what 2% of their sales were because they tip out the host and bus person that amount. Seriously. 2 are in college. We've failed math education miserably in this country. Also none of them know who the vice president is or anyone in state government, but somehow they all know and hate Obama because they lost some of their refund by not having health insurance.... which would be free or a couple dollars a month if they bothered signing up.

Rant over, as far as the watch, it took about a week for me to realize the genius of it. I love it, once its available to buy in store or other places its going to be the must have device this holiday season. Everyone asks me about it. Also lots of cute guys hit on me at the gay bar because of it :cool:
 
Calcbot is ok, but doing a force touch to get the operators is quite annoying. And I could’t find an operator for quick percent calculations.
Therefor I prefer the calculator SC-323PU (https://itunes.apple.com/app/id301290196) on my Apple Watch where the operators are buttons just like on a real calculator. Percent calculations are included and it does tip calculation, unit and currency conversions and also scientific functions (which I find very useful in my job because I cannot figure out the cosine of some odd number in my head…).

@alfonsog: I totally agree with you@alfonsog I totally agree with you…
 
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Calcbot and the other calculators apps are so frustrating to use they are just useless. The apps don't use the processor of the watch instead they bluetooth between the watch to the phone to calculate. When you input the number there is lag and sometime it is unresponsive. The watch needs a native calculator app, the third party apps are a joke.
 
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blackbear219 said:
My wife and I like Wunderlist to manage our grocery list.
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For me the best app for the Apple Watch is this http://itunes.apple.com/app/id771664052
Its a simple but useful shopping list with automatic price reminder. I used this app already the last week when I was buying my groceries and it helped me saving money. But such apps are hard to find.

The problem with the Apple Watch app is not that are no useful apps. The problem is that they are hard to find. The App Store ranking must really get improved. And the featured apps list is far from being useful. You must browse through all of the 3000+ apps to find the useful ones.
 
If you need a calculator to figure out what a 10 or 15% tip would be.. well, please just don't breed.
 
kodos said:
Revolutionary! LOL. I still don't quite get it. I have a Smartwatch (Asus Zenwatch) and at first - I was having fun with apps like these, then I slowly started pulling my phone out because the UX is simply better and I have to have it on me at all times anyway.

There's this weird schism between what we want to do on the watches and what we want to do with our phones. I don't think this is a case of Google Wear being inferior, I just haven't seen the killer app for these things yet.
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I think of the Apple Watch as multiple wearable devices in one.

The iPhone launched as iPod (Existed already) + Pocket Internet Device (A new thing!) + Phone, but became much more. To me, my iPhone is iPod + Pocket Computer + Phone + Camera.

The Apple Watch has launched as Wearable Fitness Tracker (Existed already) + Wrist-based Communications Device (A new thing!) + Wristwatch.

It will become (and already is) much more with other apps.
 
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