I broke up with my Apple Watch. Here were its top five most annoying moments:
• Earlier this month I was furiously cooking dinner, scrambling around my kitchen when the phone woke up and alerted me that it was time to stand.
• The time I spent an hour sweating and suffering at the gym with my personal trainer and the watch said I had only been active for 12 minutes. (My heartrate was high and accurate; go figure.)
• The next day when the bulk of my day involved sitting at my computer and the watch registered a phantom exercise session.
• When my favorite flash sale app, Rue La La, became the bane of my existence because it synced from my iPhone to the watch, continually alerting me about new sales. Why would anyone make a shopping app for a tiny watchface?
• Every night when I realize the watch battery requires charging or it won’t last until tomorrow. (And therefore I can’t use it to track my sleep.)
I know the Apple zealots will call me a whiner. True enough that it’s intuitive to use, gorgeous to look at and does a lot of useful things. It was comfortable to wear, and convenient in many ways. Not having to pull my phone out to see who was messaging me? Super beneficial, especially as a working mom who’s always judged for smartphone use at the playground or a school. I’ve never felt scorn for checking the time! That’s why having to break up with my watch was a bummer.
I bought the watch for its fitness-tracking capabilities but found it never was ?remotely accurate. I tried tightening it, and I tried loosening it, tried a different wrist and positioning, but the measurements never improved.
Surely I’m not the only one. A year after its launch and fresh off a $50 price drop, the Apple Watch has gained no traction among consumers. Sales are flat, reviews are mixed at best and all hope rests on the second iteration of the device, which could be released this fall.
Fresh off my disappointment in the watch as a fitness tracker, I switched to a totally different device: the app-connected Withings Activite Steel, which looks just like an analog watch. It costs about half what I paid for my Apple Watch sport. It does only a few things, but it does them very well.
A sub-dial discreetly lets me know how close I am to my daily goal of 10,000 steps. The battery lasts eight months, and it tracks my sleep down to the amount of time spent in REM. It synchronizes with the excellent Withings HealthMate app and MyFitnessPal, adjusting my daily calorie intake limits based on how much I’ve exercised. Speaking of exercise, the ?Activite is spot-on. For instance, last week it told me I exercised for 242 minutes, which is completely in line with the two hours I spent at the gym and two hours spent clumsily running around my neighborhood.
At first, I missed getting message notifications on the watch, but I’ve actually found myself continuing the habit of pulling out my phone less, which is a good thing.
Apple may have missed a huge opportunity to release the best fitness tracker on the market and instead decided to give us a tiny, abridged iPhone with a wrist band. But that doesn’t mean that its next iteration won’t be that revolutionary new product we were initially promised.
Many of Apple’s products have needed a bit of room to grow, so there’s a chance that the successor will have its act together. For its part, Apple has successfully convinced me that I want a smartwatch — just not the one it sells.
