So, after a few weeks with my Ultra, I’m quite happy. For me, at least, it’s solved all the shortcomings of my old S4 and added some nice bonus features on top. It’s even good enough as a basic smartphone phone that I’m keeping my Xs in my backpack, not my pocket, and I’m not afraid to leave the Xs behind altogether.
I expect to keep the Ultra at least as long as I had the S4 (my first Apple Watch, which I also bought on release day). Considering how indestructible this thing is, I could well see keeping it a lot, lot longer.
Part of that vision … well, I have a difficult time imagining what would make me want an updated watch before this Ultra somehow gives up the ghost. I can think of all sorts of “Gee, that’d be nice” features, but “must-have” is a stretch.
Most obvious, of course, would be blood pressure and glucose monitoring. But I don’t currently have any problems with either; they’d be like the EKG: a cool feature, to be sure, but not likely to change my life. (Of course, for the millions who do suffer from hypertension and / or diabetes, such features could be truly life-altering, if not life-saving!)
I’m sure we’ll eventually see a Dick Tracy style camera under the display that permits video calls. Again, cool … but, aside from Zoom meetings where my camera is almost always turned off, I’m not using video calls anywhere else (despite doing so being trivial). It’d presumably be great for, say, an engineer at a construction site in an awkward location wanting quick feedback from the architect, but I’m neither of those people.
Of course, I wouldn’t say, “no,” to a longer-lasting battery, but I’m currently wearing the Ultra for 23 1/2 hours a day and rarely going below 35% charge (or above 85%), so that wouldn’t be enough in and of itself, either. And similar reasoning applies to the rest of the base features: improvements would be welcome, but it’s already plenty good enough. Like, would making the always-on display be always full-power be that much of an improvement? How much more is there to improve on the speakerphone? The display bezels only have half a millimeter or so they could shrink. And so on.
And many of the minor improvements I’d most like to see — such as Backtrack overlaid over a map, or a full-featured interface to the already-darned-good WebKit engine — would be pure software, hopefully coming with a not-terribly-distant OS update.
How ’bout the rest of all y’all?
Cheers,
b&
I expect to keep the Ultra at least as long as I had the S4 (my first Apple Watch, which I also bought on release day). Considering how indestructible this thing is, I could well see keeping it a lot, lot longer.
Part of that vision … well, I have a difficult time imagining what would make me want an updated watch before this Ultra somehow gives up the ghost. I can think of all sorts of “Gee, that’d be nice” features, but “must-have” is a stretch.
Most obvious, of course, would be blood pressure and glucose monitoring. But I don’t currently have any problems with either; they’d be like the EKG: a cool feature, to be sure, but not likely to change my life. (Of course, for the millions who do suffer from hypertension and / or diabetes, such features could be truly life-altering, if not life-saving!)
I’m sure we’ll eventually see a Dick Tracy style camera under the display that permits video calls. Again, cool … but, aside from Zoom meetings where my camera is almost always turned off, I’m not using video calls anywhere else (despite doing so being trivial). It’d presumably be great for, say, an engineer at a construction site in an awkward location wanting quick feedback from the architect, but I’m neither of those people.
Of course, I wouldn’t say, “no,” to a longer-lasting battery, but I’m currently wearing the Ultra for 23 1/2 hours a day and rarely going below 35% charge (or above 85%), so that wouldn’t be enough in and of itself, either. And similar reasoning applies to the rest of the base features: improvements would be welcome, but it’s already plenty good enough. Like, would making the always-on display be always full-power be that much of an improvement? How much more is there to improve on the speakerphone? The display bezels only have half a millimeter or so they could shrink. And so on.
And many of the minor improvements I’d most like to see — such as Backtrack overlaid over a map, or a full-featured interface to the already-darned-good WebKit engine — would be pure software, hopefully coming with a not-terribly-distant OS update.
How ’bout the rest of all y’all?
Cheers,
b&
