[danso]

It's pretty exciting to anticipate how developers might do innovative things with the Watch...but until then, I'm pretty bearish of the device as something of real utility. It's not just the particulars of Apple's execution and implementation, but just that the physical form factor of a watch inherently limits it...and the coolest things we've seen watches do in fiction, such as Dick Tracy's wrist-walkie-talkie, are done just fine via smartphone. And glancing at your watch all the time is not much less of a social interruption than pulling out your phone.

What annoys me in reading consumer-facing reviews of the product is how much of the perceived potential is through things that should be done by software...for example, the ability to filter notifications from the phone...there's no reason why a second (or third, fourth, etc) layer of notification triage can't be implemented as a phone setting...in fact, I think iPhone's Do Not Disturb mode is fantastically better done than its Android equivalent. But to think that the Watch, or any ancillary device, is needed to inherently solve the problem of filtering information overload...it's as if rather than developing better spam filters, email providers just encouraged consumers to make multiple email accounts to handle the deluge.

So hopefully Apple increasingly opens up the API for developers, to do things far beyond what Apple has anticipated in its marketing plan.

[wpietri]

Your comment on social interruption really resonates with me. As somebody who has been wearing a Pebble for a couple of years, the main utility I have discovered is in minimizing the number of times I take out my phone. But it's not really about reducing the onerous physical labor of putting my hand in my pocket. It's about being more present.

Right now I get wrist notifications maybe 5-10 times a day. E.g, my next meeting, a text message. I can sneak a glance in during a meeting and then either carry on or smoothly bring things to an end so I can deal with something urgent. That's about what I want; anything else can wait until I'm free, at which point I'll pull out my phone and skim the non-urgent stuff that has stacked up.

Despite having poked at the SDK, and despite having built a personal-use Android app in the meantime, I haven't really had the urge to build anything for the Pebble. I don't want more on my wrist.

[rabbyte]

I want a bracelet to replace my phone and pebble.

[frik]

Apple Watch v1 is a first step. I am pretty sure v2 will be huge. (akin to iPhone2 aka 3G, and iPad2)

For certain occasions like doing outdoor sport, an inbuilt low-power 2G phone modem would be awesome, so that one can use it without a smartphone in the pocket. One can also imagine an improved Siri app. Both combined with a improved battery that lasts 2+ days would be an instant buy.

[ForrestN]

Do you have an Apple Watch? Is this review based on your experiences using it for some time?

I think in practice some of your guesses about notifications and interruption are proving wrong for most people because of the phenomenology of the Taptic engine.

[danso]

I haven't used it but I think there are some biases going in that would affect how I feel of it regardless. For example, for my iPhone, I limit notifications to calls and SMS. Except for the occasional marketer, phone calls are normally "important", and I'm not sure, Watch or not, how I could effectively whitelist calls in such a way that would not block the myriad of important calls from first-time numbers.

In terms of text messages: I guess it's hard to think of a situation in which the ability to glance at my wrist instead of investigating the vibration in my pocket is a huge advantage. Text messages can sometimes be important, but if I'm expecting a text message in a given time period, I'll put myself in a situation in which having the phone out is not a problem (i.e. not be in a movie theater).

I guess one situation in which having a watch is better than a phone: when you're moving around in such a way that you don't notice/hear the phone going off. I've missed calls that way. But I guess I'm not in that situation enough to justify a new device...I mean, that's helpful, but we're not yet that far removed from a time when we had to arrange our rendezvous and appointments with no expectation that we could contact people in mid-transit (i.e. before cell phones).

I don't consider myself a huge Luddite. I waited in line for the first iPad, but with that, I felt the value proposition was obvious: this is a computer you can walk around with in one hand and read/navigate/etc....even just reading from a tablet is obviously appealing, in the way that reading a physical book/magazine/newspaper is more appealing (despite limitations) than from a laptop or desktop. The value of iPods and iPhones was never hard to figure out either, even if you doubted whether or not they were worth the price over their competitors.

[josho]

I wish more folks took your perspective on notifications. We need to reduce distractions, not make distractions less distracting. Of course for many companies like Facebook this leads to slower growth and less engagement, so I don't see it happening anytime soon—that is unless we all take your perspective with respect to technology and change the default settings to notify us of only important/time sensitive information.