(Business Insider / Matt Johnston)The Apple Watch.
It's still the early days of the Apple Watch. Besides a select group of journalists and celebrities, most people didn't get to start using one until Friday.
I started using one on loan from Apple. It's the steel model with a sports band that costs $599. I'll have a full, detailed review in a few days. In the meantime, here's what I've noticed about the Apple Watch after using it over the weekend.
There's a learning curve.
The Apple Watch isn't a mini iPhone strapped to your wrist. It's a brand-new type of gadget that has its own control scheme. It took me a good day to learn what all the various swipes, taps, buttons, and dials do. But now that I'm used to it, I don't even think about how to operate the Apple Watch. The controls may sound complicated at first, but they become second nature sooner than you'd expect.
The display is mostly off.
My Apple Watch's display is dark about 99% of the time. It's always working in the background, tracking my movement, monitoring my heart rate, and pulling in notifications from my phone, but the display doesn't activate unless I lift my wrist or tap on the screen. Otherwise, it's just a nice-looking piece of jewelry.
The Apple Watch isn't an iPhone replacement. It's a supplement to the iPhone.
Notifications are useful, not annoying.
I've tested a few smartwatches over the years. Most were a pain to wear because they dumped all the notifications from my phone to my wrist. The Apple Watch app on iPhone gives me better control over which notifications I see. The first thing I did was switch off notifications for most apps except the ones I use the most.
I also like how subtle the vibrations are when I get a new notification. It's not annoying at all, more like someone lightly tapping my wrist. Plus, the watch doesn't light up with each new notification. You have to lift your wrist to view it instead. (Or ignore the notification and check it later.) That's much better than many other smartwatches that have strong vibrations and that light up with every notification.
My favorite function so far is texting.
I love getting text messages on my Apple Watch. It saves me time from pulling out my phone and unlocking my device just to read what someone sent me. Instead, I can get a quick glance at the message on my watch and decide whether I need to respond. And even if I do, I can usually just respond with a canned response or emoji already stored in the Apple Watch. It saves a lot of time.
(Business Insider)The Apple Watch lets you send animated emojis through the Messages app.