After running the beta for a few days, I thought I'd share my impressions of Watch OS 3 very briefly. Main points:
- Scribble is HUGE - Perfect transcription and you can draw letters as fast as you like - the watch keeps up or catches up (it seems to apply some of its autocorrect smarts as you write). It's pretty much perfect and stops me getting out my phone at all to reply to messages. I feel pretty detached from it due to being able to do this. It's strange. I can use it to reply on any app that let's a user reply from the Apple Watch already. So WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are already working great with it. Apple have nailed the keyboard on the watch.
- Dock - You can hold 10 apps and a recently used app on here. Their speed is literally what Apple showed off in the keynote. This one will expand to more apps until the dock is just a favourites/most used quick select like on the Mac. It's great. Some apps will need to be re-jiggered as they weren't designed for glance-able information. But it's a massive step forward for every app that embraces it. I actually use third party apps now on my Watch. So again, huge.
- Watch face control on your phone - You can now select, customise and install faces on your phone. So much easier with a bigger screen. You can see all the available complications and colour options and add the face to your watch easily. It's not hard to see how this section can easily expand to include extra faces from third parties.
Those three things (mainly the first two) take the biggest pain points of the Apple Watch and hit the nail on the head. If you were worried that the honeycomb didn't get a make over, don't worry. You hardly use it. The dock will give developers a kick up the butt in terms of what apps they're making and how we interact with them. That model has been redefined in a hugely improved way and you can see groundwork being laid. For every one on the beta, enjoy. For everyone waiting patiently, be excited. It feels like a whole new generation of device.
- Scribble is HUGE - Perfect transcription and you can draw letters as fast as you like - the watch keeps up or catches up (it seems to apply some of its autocorrect smarts as you write). It's pretty much perfect and stops me getting out my phone at all to reply to messages. I feel pretty detached from it due to being able to do this. It's strange. I can use it to reply on any app that let's a user reply from the Apple Watch already. So WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are already working great with it. Apple have nailed the keyboard on the watch.
- Dock - You can hold 10 apps and a recently used app on here. Their speed is literally what Apple showed off in the keynote. This one will expand to more apps until the dock is just a favourites/most used quick select like on the Mac. It's great. Some apps will need to be re-jiggered as they weren't designed for glance-able information. But it's a massive step forward for every app that embraces it. I actually use third party apps now on my Watch. So again, huge.
- Watch face control on your phone - You can now select, customise and install faces on your phone. So much easier with a bigger screen. You can see all the available complications and colour options and add the face to your watch easily. It's not hard to see how this section can easily expand to include extra faces from third parties.
Those three things (mainly the first two) take the biggest pain points of the Apple Watch and hit the nail on the head. If you were worried that the honeycomb didn't get a make over, don't worry. You hardly use it. The dock will give developers a kick up the butt in terms of what apps they're making and how we interact with them. That model has been redefined in a hugely improved way and you can see groundwork being laid. For every one on the beta, enjoy. For everyone waiting patiently, be excited. It feels like a whole new generation of device.
