Apple announced its smartwatch platform on Tuesday, and although we know infinitely more than we did before CEO Tim Cook’s reveal, there’s still a lot of unanswered questions about the device that won’t go on sale until early 2015. Of course, it’s hard to pack all the information a consumer might need to know into a short two-hour presentation, which also covered the new iPhones. But for the prospective customer, there’s still a lot that needs to be cleared up before you feel comfortable plunking down $349 for the latest Apple product. Some of the questions may end up having answers that Apple wanted to distract from, but other questions may simply be waiting for their time to be answered.

1. How long will its battery last?

Battery life will be critical for the Apple Watch, and the early indication, based on a Tim Cook quip, is that you might be charging it every night like a smartphone. That would put the Apple Watch roughly in line with the battery life currently available on Android Wear devices.

If Apple expects its users to charge the Apple Watch on a nightly basis, that means it can’t fill one of the best early use cases demonstrated by other wearable fitness bands: a subtle, vibrating alarm clock. Wouldn’t it be nice to get woken up gently by a vibration, instead of a loud alarm that also wakes up your sweetie?

For a piece of wearable technology to become ubiquitous, people need to commit to wearing it every day, and there’s no better reason for leaving your fancy new Apple Watch at home than a dead battery.

Apple Watch. Photo by Tom Krazit/Gigaom

2. How fragile is the Apple Watch?

Regardless of how shiny and nice new Apple products are, someone’s eventually going to break theirs, judging from the number of people going around with cracked iPhone screens. But when you crack your iPhone, most people still carry them around so others can get in touch. A broken Apple Watch could end up at the bottom of a drawer. The Apple Watch comes with a sapphire crystal screen cover, but that may only provide better scratch protection, not impact protection.

3. What’s inside the case?

Courtesy of Apple

Apple focused a lot on the look and functions that the Apple Watch can fill, but didn’t give us a whole lot of information about its specs. We still don’t know what resolution the screen is running at, or how big the battery is, or what kind of processor is powering the device. The back side of the watch has a battery of four different sensors, but we don’t have a lot of details on them. Apple teased a little bit of information about a new custom chip a called S1, but what separates the S1 (which Apple refers to as a System In Package, or SiP) from the Qualcomm Snapdragon chips powering similar Android Wear watches?