Apple Watch is the best smartwatch on the market: Our review

The Apple Watch arrives on our wrists under a cloud of intense scrutiny, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the first iPhone. It has to succeed where other smartwatches have failed. It has to satisfy the varied and intense desires of the fashion-conscious.It's fair to say that critics have been stockpiling ammo: This risky product cannot succeed. It’s one act of hubris too far. No one wears watches anymore, especially not those produced by Apple.I started this review process as a serious skeptic, but not a denier. I wear a smartwatch (the Pebble Steel) almost every day. When I started testing the Apple Watch almost a week ago, I insisted on wearing the Pebble on my left wrist while wearing the new device on my right to compare. However, a few days in, I realized I was no longer glancing at the Pebble.I finally left the Pebble behind, and I don’t miss it. That's because the Apple Watch is an excellent, elegant, stylish, smart and fundamentally sound device.

DESIGN

When I received the watch I needed to remove six pieces from the strap for a perfect fit. I've resized other metal watch straps before, and it’s a difficult and often frustrating process best left to watch repair shops. That's not the case with the Apple Watch. The exquisitely crafted bracelet makes adding and removing links near child’s play. Each segment has a small button on the back that you press to unlink it. Adding in links is easy, as is changing out the entire strap.If you think all these buttons and sliding make the watch feel cheap, you’d be wrong. In fact, my Apple Watch never felt like anything less than the $1,000 device it is. (You can spend less — a lot less — on an Apple Watch, but I doubt the aluminum Sport model, which starts at $349, will have that same luxury feel.)

Everything about the Apple Watch whispers craftsmanship. The sapphire crystal display (sport models have the same glass you’ll find on an iPhone 6) connects almost seamlessly to the stainless steel case. However, it bothers me that the digital crown — also stainless steel and topped with a circle of color (black in my case) — is not centered. I collect watches, and this shift is an affront to my horological sensibilities. On the other hand, some of my favorite classic watches are the ones that do things a little differently. I still recall one that managed to include a cigarette lighter (ah, the 1970s).

Righty or lefty, whatever wrist you choose or orientation you desire, Apple Watch has you covered. The utility app lets you set left or right wrist orientation and if you want the digital crown on the left or right side.There’s only one other button, which gets the inglorious name of “side button.” The opposite edge has two narrow slots for the speakers and a tiny round hole for the microphone. On the back is a large sapphire crystal circle, and within them is a quad of sensors. The circle bulges a bit out of the back, and I was certain this would make the Apple Watch feel uncomfortable. It didn’t.In fact, the watch was a perfect fit. It felt right on my wrist. I wore it all day long and, unlike some other smartwatches I’ve worn, I wasn't desperate to take it off at the end of the day. This is in stark contrast to the experiences I've had with most first-generation smartwatches. Devices like the Moto 360 and the LG G Watch R perform many of the same functions as the Apple Watch, but both lack the design elegance and sheer comfort of it.

SETUP
My experience with the Apple Watch started off with disappointment. An Apple rep pressed the digital crown, which is also used to scroll and zoom on the interface, to start up the device. It took quite a while to launch. I thought that if everything was this slow, the Apple Watch would be the company's first catastrophic failure in more than a decade. That long boot time set expectations super low, but everything else vastly exceeded them. I also never again had to restart the watch.The device's resting face is, unlike the Pebble, black. It lights up and shows the watch face as soon as you raise your wrist. This worked flawlessly. Keep your wrist raised long enough and Apple Watch will go dark again. It's easy to bring back with a touch of the screen.Apple Watch can operate as a hyper-accurate timepiece on its own, but there is real magic when it’s paired with your iPhone. Apple overstepped a bit by making the Apple Watch utility a permanent app in iOS 8.2, but if you do own an Apple Watch, you’ll be glad it’s there. It's also a lot easier to use than Android Wear, the companion utility that connects Android phones and Android wearables.

Pairing the device is easy: The watch displays a pattern on its Retina screen, which you capture with the iPhone's camera. That’s it.In the Apple Watch utility app, you sign in with your Apple ID and choose your apps and your wrist orientation. I like to wear my watch on my right wrist, which puts the digital crown on the outside. Apple recommended I wear it so the crown pointed toward my hand. I consider this an affront to the watch gods and insisted I would keep the crown where it should be: pointed toward my elbow. In practice, I might have done well to take Apple’s advice. I used the digital crown regularly and was often reaching over and around the face to use it. I got used to it, but I now see the point of putting the crown on the other side.

CUSTOMIZATION
Once you make your choice, Apple Watch’s exterior is largely fixed. The interface, however, is another matter.There are more than a half dozen face choices, and most of them have customizable “complications.” You may think this label is a bad choice, but Apple is carrying the watch-making ethos as far as possible — maybe even too far. (Watchmakers call little things on watch faces, like an extra second hand and visible day and dates calendar, complications.) Apple’s digital facsimiles do much the same thing and more. You can add things like moon phases, battery percentage and access to the very busy and seemingly ever-present Activity app.Selecting and customizing watch faces is a good tour of how you'll control, manage and customize the Apple Watch on a daily basis. To select a new watch face, press down on your present one until you feel a vibration. (It feels like you’re actually pressing down the sapphire crystal, but don't worry, you’re not. It’s just Apple’s new haptics-based "Force Touch.") The vibration takes you into a carousel of choices. Once you select one, you’ll see portions of the watch interface. You can change the complications by tapping and then using the digital crown’s scroll feature (kind of like winding a real watch) to make your selection. I usually customized the watch so I could always see how much battery power was left.

While the Apple Watch face is what you’ll see most — it automatically appears when you raise your wrist and disappears as soon as you lower it — there is another screen. The Home screen has tiny, round apps, utility and setup icons against a black background. It might remind you a bit of an iPhone. You can move the whole thing around by touching the screen and zooming in and out on icons with the digital crown. In fact, you can zoom all the way into a launch of any app. This is preferable to trying to tap on a tiny icon. Alternatively, you can zoom part of the way and then tap. I did it both ways and was equally satisfied.While the roughly 1 x ¾-inch screen is small (think watch size), it's never hard to read, thanks to the high resolution and choice of font. Actually, the font ("San Francisco") is a new creation by Apple. It looks custom-made for at-a-glance readability.

NOTIFICATIONS
Besides apps (we'll dive into those later), there are two other areas that will occupy a lot of your attention.The first is Glances, functions that are supposed to command no more than, well, a glance. That is more or less true. Glances live under the Apple Watch face. You access them by sweeping up on the watch face and scrolling left and right through the options that include calendar, location, weather, stocks and heart rate (one of the many times Apple Watch will offer to measure your health in some way).I think the less time spent with these things the better. When I did try to see deeper reports through the stocks Glance, I was left hanging. I realized it would be easier to simply pull out my phone. The whole point of the Apple Watch is to free us from the tyranny of our iPhone. When you pull out that device, you don’t just look at one thing — you start looking at everything. Using Glances for just a quick look is the right way to do it.

Sliding down your finger from the top of the screen will pull notifications over the watch face like a curtain. These notifications more or less replicate all that you would see on your iPhone. Unlike Glances, notifications scroll vertically. You can control which app notifications show on the watch through the iPhone-based utility. The visibility of those app, email and social notifications, which are the same as on your iPhone, can be managed on a case-by-case basis through the Apple Watch utility.Apple Watch’s notifications are tied to the new Taptic Engine. It endeavors to give you some fairly nuanced haptic — or touch — responses for a variety of notifications. There are, for instance, deep buzzes, slow buzzes, light taps, double taps and more, all of which you feel on your wrist. I couldn't always tell the difference, though I could distinguish between a single tap — it felt like someone tapping on my wrist — and a long, prominent buzz.

MESSAGING & CALLS
Apple’s efforts to make the Apple Watch like a traditional watch mostly succeed. But there is no denying that the device is far more than a luxury watch that tells time, date and temperature. There is a collection of features that make Apple Watch an adept communication device.For instance, I made and received phone calls on the Apple Watch. The watch buzzed, and I saw on screen that I had a call (with the contact info visible). When I tapped the screen to answer, the call was audible, but somewhat hard to hear. It was also kind of fun. (That’s likely the nerd in me talking, but seriously, it was fun.)

Apple Watch also turned out to be an excellent messaging device. Messages popped up on screen, and I had the option of sending one of a half dozen or so boilerplate responses by scrolling and tapping. Using voice recognition, I could also speak a response into the watch. Voice recognition did an admirable job of interpreting my words, though I wish it worked more quickly. One time, I thought the watch didn’t hear me. But it turns out that it was on a delay; it picked up what I said in the message and what I said after the message. I lazily sent all of it to my sister.There’s also another way to keep in touch with those closest to you.The side button has two purposes. Digital Touch, which is accessed by pressing the button once, brings up a circle of friends. You can use the digital crown to scroll to the friend whom you want to contact, then tap the screen to select him or her. After that, you can choose to call, message or use the Digital Touch option, which lets you draw a silly picture that will be transmitted exactly the same way you drew it on the tiny screen.

It’s virtually impossible to draw anything decent on screen, so you really just doodle or write a couple of words with your fingertip. You can also tap the screen. Each Digital Touch you create on your Apple Watch — the doodle, “heart beats” and taps, which look like colorful versions of the circular wave patterns you get when you throw a pebble into a lake — appear on your contact’s Apple Watch, exactly as you created them.You can also put two fingers on the screen and send your heartbeat. But this stuff is pretty much useless unless you know someone else with an Apple Watch.

HEALTH
The Apple Watch cares deeply about your health — or at least it seems that way, considering it constantly monitors your vitals and insists you get moving.I’m a pretty active guy and in okay shape, but my level of activity doesn't appear to meet the Apple Watch's expectations.There are two Apple Watch apps devoted to health: Activity and Workout. Activity is always monitoring. It watches when you move, exercise and stand. On the Apple Watch, I was able to define the level of activity I was looking for. In hindsight, it was too low; I was often lapping myself on the circular interface. I finally adjusted my activity goals so I wouldn’t surpass them as often. (Hey, maybe this Apple Activity thing is working.)

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Stand, one of the rings in Activity, is the best-named component. You get credit for standing and moving about (the Apple Watch’s sensors are that good). If you don’t stand often enough, a reminder pops up (and you get a Taptic tap on the wrist) reminding you to do so. I only got this during a two-hour drive and on a three-hour flight. If you’re a bit sedentary at a desk job, this little reminder could be a godsend.
Exercise in the Activity app, is, well, not always real exercise. A brisk walk counts. I honestly don’t get why there is exercise in this app and an entire separate app called Workout. I have mixed feelings about the Workout app, but this is mostly because I don't work out like most people. I don’t run, use an elliptical or go to SoulCycle. I have a small set of solitary workout routines, which include push-ups and pull-ups, that the app doesn’t list. As a result, I always selected "other" when preparing to start my workout.

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I found that it was a struggle to get the Apple Watch to properly account for my routine. The built-in accelerometer doesn't know I'm rapidly moving my body up and down because my wrist isn't moving. Plus, I think my workouts are too short for the Apple Watch to really give them the kind of credit I think they deserve. At least I got credit for pushing my heart rate up to 122 bpm. My experience with the Workout app got a bit better when I reduced the estimated calories burned. Honestly, I had my best "workout experience" when I used it during an intensive house-cleaning session. I got full credit for the workout and more.I'm not saying these aren't worthwhile health and fitness apps. (The apps, by the way, can work in concert with the health-related sensors in the iPhone 6, though you do not need the phone with you to work out.) It's just that I've never been much interested in fitness bands, so a brighter, shinier one isn’t necessarily going to win me over. Those devoted to fitness and fitness bands will probably love it, especially the fact that they can wear just one device that does it all.As for me, I’ve only had a week with the Apple Watch. Give me a few months and I may see more utility in it as the device learns more about my activities and adjusts, which it will do.

UTILITY
As Apple promised, the Apple Watch is a fully functioning Apple Pay device. You register credit cards with it, just as you would with the iPhone. You take pictures of the cards with your phone and they feed into the Apple Watch utility, which pops them into the watch. Each one you put in gets a unique token. Apple Watch includes wrist detection, and Apple Pay won’t work if the watch isn’t on your wrist. If the watch is on your wrist, it'll automatically unlock if your phone is nearby. If not, you’ll have to enter your preset PIN.Other than that, it's incredibly easy to make purchases with Apple Watch. I bought a Shamrock Shake at McDonald's, where the clerk didn’t bat an eye when I double pressed on the side button, selected the credit card I wanted to use and then waved the watch over the NFC reader. In Walgreens, the clerk smiled brightly and seemed to enjoy the show.

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It was all so easy. Maybe a bit too easy. It made the act of spending money feel like a routine magic trick with no consequences, even though the funds were definitely coming out of my bank account.And I had even more fun at the airport.Apple’s Passbook is integrated with the Apple Watch, and if you’re willing to install airline apps on your iPhone you'll be able to access boarding passes on the watch.Each time I accessed my boarding pass, waved it over check-in at TSA or used it to board the plane, I got a reaction. My favorite was when I caused a bit of a commotion at boarding, and the flight attendant called me James Bond.

APPS
I saved Apps for near last, not because it’s the best part of Apple Watch, but because it’s the area that needs (and will see) the most improvement. The device comes with a bunch of pre-installed apps, and you can add more through the Apple Watch utility on your iPhone.Of the pre-installed apps, I’m most impressed with Photos and Maps. Both make excellent use of the digital crown scroll capabilities. I couldn't get over Maps' clarity as I stood along the shores of Lake Superior. Sure, it's using the phone's GPS to locate my position, but the combination of the digital crown and the high-resolution display make scrolling into my pulsing, blue position and then way out on the map to the surrounding area a pleasure. I also got directions from the Apple Watch’s Siri integration, which you access by pressing and holding the digital crown. When I wasn’t looking at the watch, it would tap my wrist to let me know about an upcoming turn.However, I often found that new apps took forever to install, and they then worked sporadically. I installed Trivia Crack and initially couldn't get it to work. It took initiating a game on the iPhone for it to finally be available on the watch.

The Twitter app is oddly neutered. You view timelines and trending topics, but not your own notifications. I could retweet and favorite tweets, but I couldn't figure out how to create and send tweets from the watch. [Update: Twitter later showed me how to do that, but it's not obvious.]

The Twitter interface on the Apple Watch. You can view recent tweets, but you can't compose tweets.

The Maps interface on the Apple Watch is super clear.

I could request an Uber through the watch, and peruse photo libraries on my phone. The Watch can also hold music. You can select what playlist will live on the watch through the utility app — up to 2 GB — and then play directly to any paired Bluetooth device. You can also simply use it to control music that will play from the iPhone. In my tests, the effective range was no more than 25 feet between the watch and my Jambox before the audio started breaking up.

One of the Apple Watch’s best tricks is the ability to take pictures. Though, to be clear, Apple Watch does not have a camera. Starting the app opens the camera on your paired phone, and on your Apple Watch you see what the iPhone camera sees. You can tap the watch screen to take a picture or, more usefully, use the countdown option on the app to take a selfie.

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BATTERY LIFE
Battery life may have been the best surprise of all. Almost every single day I used the Apple Watch, I ended the day with at least 30% power left — even when I turned up the brightness to 100%.For charging, the MagSafe inductive charging mechanism automatically snaps into place on the back of the Apple Watch. I never had an issue with it, though I did one time accidentally miss-seat the plug in a wall outlet and woke up to find the watch had 16% power. I got it to a full charge in an hour and a half.

The Apple Watch had a near-perfect record... until Sunday, when it inexplicably ended up with 5% power at 6 p.m. — hours earlier than normal. I enabled Power Reserve mode, which turned the Apple Watch into a very expensive digital watch of basics, no notifications, no apps, no activity tracking, just a digital readout of the time.I honestly can’t account for why this day was different than all others, but I’ve had such a strong and positive experience with Apple Watch battery life (18 hours seemed to be on the nose) that I’ll call this an anomaly.

BOTTOM LINE
I didn’t expect to like the Apple Watch. But I didn’t expect to dislike it either. I feared my reaction would be meh. That would’ve been a shame because I believe in wearables and have been pulling for a breakout star.The Apple Watch is that breakout star. It’s gorgeous, smart, fun, extensible, expensive (a plus if you want to telegraph luxury and excellence) and an object of true desire.Like any 1.0 product, the Apple Watch isn’t perfect. The S1 chip has pep, but the watch could lag. The hyped Taptic response is useful, but not a game-changer. And I can’t make myself care about the ability to send heartbeats (though I do like to occasionally check my heart rate, especially after vigorous activity).

At $1,000, my stainless steel Apple Watch sits closer to the higher end of the watch-buying spectrum. It would be easy to ding Apple for that, except for the fact that you can buy Apple Watch Sport for $349 and there are a wide array of design and material choices in between (and above) my device. All of them, though, will share that unmistakable craftsmanship and what I consider the best wearable OS on the market.Apple Watch does as much, maybe more, than competing smartwatches, but it doesn’t demand that you pay attention to it. It also succeeded in its most important task: Getting me to keep my iPhone in my pocket. That’s a pretty impressive feat.Is my life better because of it? It’s too soon to tell. But what I do know is that I thoroughly enjoy wearing it.