BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

The Apple Watch Gets One Thing Very Right: It's The First Smartwatch That's Not A Distraction

This article is more than 8 years old.

Smartwatches, at their core, are notification machines—devices aimed at allowing you to filter through the firehose of alerts and beeps and vibrations that come from an app-filled phone, so that you only spend your time tackling the important ones. The goal is to minimize how much your phone distracts you, and how much it distracts the real, live people around you.

This is a basic mission, but one that many smartwatches do a pretty lousy job of tackling. One particular problem I've repeatedly encountered: These devices tend to indiscriminately light up my wrist with every alert, forcing me to pull up my sleeve or quickly activate "Mute" so as to keep them from drawing the gazes of everybody around me. If you're in a movie theater or dimly lit bar, your lit-up wrist might as well be the sun, drawing stares and "harumphs" from those around you. While these devices seek to dial down the distractions, they end up being one themselves. This is one reason why, up until now, the Pebble smartwatch has been perhaps the best one on the market—its use of E-Ink e-paper (writer's note: thanks to the commentator for the correction) for the display (as opposed to the more-common full-color LCD screens) keeps it from being a big, bright distraction to those around you. A smartwatch should dissapear. Very few actually do.

The Apple Watch is the first LCD smartwatch that actually handles this issue in a sensible manner. With the Apple Watch, notifications cause your wrist to vibrate, but the screen does not light up at first. The genius touch: Thanks to clever use of an internal accelerometer, the screen only comes alive when you turn your wrist towards your face, so as to look at it. If you're locked in conversation and you find yourself on the receiving end of a bunch of alerts, nobody else has to know. And while this won't-light-up-until-you-look-at-it situation is possible on some Android Wear watches, it is not a default, and is not executed as naturally as it is with Apple Watch.

In fact, Apple can't get enough credit for its thought-through integration of the accelerometer into the Apple Watch. As a user, a quick flick of the wrist is a natural and discreet way of signaling to the device that I want to engage with the device. If I want to know the time, simply tilting my wrsit towards my eyes causes it to pop up on the vacant screen.

I've only been testing the Apple Watch for about two days, but I've yet to find myself shamefully pulling my sleeve over its watch face to cover up a mid-conversation distraction—a near-constant habit with some other smartwatches I've used. It's too soon to say for sure just how how well the Apple Watch accomplishes the massive goal of fixing our phones' signal-to-noise ratio, but clever touches such as this are encouraging signs for the product's future.

 

Follow me on TwitterCheck out my website