Five reasons to buy the Apple Watch

The Apple Watch may be the first smartwatch to go mainstream. Why? Apple has the marketing, the retail store chain and the determination to make their watch succeed. They’ve also got millions of users around the world in their iOS eco-system, so a new product that works flawlessly with that eco-system is definitely a product that Apple users will pay attention to.

With the hype building around the hotly anticipated Apple Watch, we look more at Apple’s first generation smartwatch and see what exactly makes it greater than other smartwatches currently on the market. Is it worth spending your money on? Read on and find out. 

See also: Apple Watch Review

Having an Apple Watch attached to your wrist is a massive convenience. Why? If you get a call or a text, you don’t need to stop what you’re doing – instead, just glance at your wrist. If you’ve got a call, you can answer it and talk to the recipient directly from the Apple Watch and if you get a text you can either send back an animated emoji, a voice note or a normal text via dictation. Granted, you don’t really want to feel like Spock talking to your wrist all the time, but it’s a great feature for short calls.

It doesn’t start and end with notifications and calls though. You can use the Apple Watch to, say, control the music playing from your iPhone using the “Now Playing” Glance. Instead of fumbling around, trying to get your phone out of your pocket on the train to work every morning, you can just tap your wrist to change song or browse your musical selection. It may sound like a small feature but it’s the little things that the Apple Watch does that make it a must have.

The Maps app is also extremely convenient, especially when paired with the Apple Watch’s Taptic engine – we’ll come to that in more detail soon. Using the Maps app on your iPhone can be a pretty tedious experience, especially if you’re on foot – it’s a choice of either looking at the directions on your screen or watching where you’re going. If you’re using the Apple Watch for directions, you don’t even need to look at the display because, for example, if you need to turn left then the Apple Watch will vibrate in a unique way that tells you that you need to turn left. 

See also: 10 amazing Apple Watch facts

The first thing that many people will notice is the display of the Apple Watch. It’s significantly better than anything else on the market, as many early reviews are suggesting. That includes Nilay Patel at The Verge who, when discussing the display, said that “It’s light-years beyond everything else”.

But just how good is it? It has a retina display with a 290 or 302PPI density, depending on whether you choose the 38mm or 42mm model. This brings vivid colours and clear, crisp images to your Apple Watch, which is a feat in itself considering that many smartwatch manufacturers use low-res displays to make sure their watches last all day on a single charge (the Apple Watch does too, by the way). 

It also means that it delivers deep blacks that help to blur the line between display and bezel. It gives the Apple Watch a distinctly more premium feel than watches with displays that look like they’ve been dropped into a watch frame. 

See also: Pebble Time vs Apple Watch comparison

As we mentioned earlier, the new Taptic engine used in the Apple Watch (which is also used in the trackpad of the new MacBook) brings a new notification experience to the smartwatch. Many smartwatches have vibration motors – they’re a pretty standard feature used to discreetly alert you of an incoming notification. The only issue is that when you get a notification, both you and the people around you can hear the traditionally loud rumble of the vibration motor. 

That’s not the case with the Apple Watch. Instead of a loud rumble, the Apple Watch’s Taptic engine will give you a gentle “tap” on the wrist, discreetly letting you know about an incoming notification. The tap can come in a variety of patterns and strengths, so you can differentiate between the different types of notification before you even glance at your watch. The type of vibration depends on the audio waveform of the notification, as the Taptic engine plays a “vibration waveform” that’s directly related to the audio. 

Don’t worry if you do prefer the stronger vibration of a traditional smartwatch, Apple can accommodate you – the company has included the option of enabling a strong vibration before the gentler “tap”.  

Glances are like widgets on the Today section of the notification centre on your iPhone or iPad. The feature is designed to give you snippets of information that you can glance at and carry on with your day, without getting your iPhone out of your pocket. That’s one of the main purposes of the Apple Watch; spend less time interacting with your iPhone, and more time interacting with the world around you. 

Glances can have a variety of functions, and they’re easily accessed – just swipe up from the bottom of the display on the main clock app. Glances can include information about the weather, traffic updates for your journey home and information about your general health and fitness, thanks to its fitness tracking features. 

See also: 9 features we want to see on the Apple Watch 2

The integrated fitness tracking software is definitely a bonus when it comes to the Apple Watch, especially with its optical heart rate sensor that uses reflection of light to determine your pulse. Due to the lack of built-in GPS, you’ll need to take your iPhone with you when you’re exercising for the first few sessions. It’s not all bad news though; each time you exercise with the Apple Watch, it learns your pace and after a few sessions can operate without the use of an iPhone. A fitness tracker that learns how you run – tell us that isn’t cool!

Thanks to the myriad of on board sensors, the Apple Watch tracks calories burned, various exercise related activities, total steps, overall distance and standing time. Why standing time? It’s important to stand for a few minutes every hour because various health organisations claim that sitting down for more than six hours a day can cause an increase of heart disease by up to 64 percent! The Watch will remind you to stand up and stretch your legs if you haven’t for a while. It’ll also prompt you to try and hit your daily/weekly fitness targets, helping prompt you to undertake a healthier lifestyle.

See also: Apple Watch buyers guide – how to buy or pre-order the Apple Watch