Apple’s “newest new” product since the inception of the iPad back in 2010, will again raise the bar in the mobile technology world. The technology has been held in deep secret, in a building where no outsiders may bring in pencil and paper, let alone any recording device such as a smart phone. For the past couple of years, Apple has been collecting data in this secret location, from people working out in the gym, fitness bikes, and so on, in a bid to understand fitness, and how to make the watch an essential device for helping people keep fit.
Even companies like Facebook that have been involved in developing their side of things with Apple, have been told to bring source code designed to link up with the watch, on portable hard drives that must remain with Apple.
But what is the iWatch about? There has been a great deal of talk that it will be one of the greatest fitness aids of all time. If you’ve not moved for a certain time, it will tell you to get up and do something about it (although Samsung’s Note 4 will tell you the same thing, so there’s nothing particularly new there).
However, we do live in a world where we perhaps do not exercise, or move about as much as we used to. Technology has played a large part in that, and it would be a sense of justice if technology were to help us get out of that rut too.
The iWatch therefore has a great role to play. App developers have seen it as an opportunity to focus on two large areas of application: communication, and what this article will focus on, fitness.
For a device to work effectively in the area of fitness, it needs to be with the wearer most of the time. This is the biggest advantage over the phone, because it’s going to be attached to the user for the majority of the time; a phone is not.
This isn’t Apple’s first foray into this industry. Remember the old days when the iPhone and iTouch first came out? There was that little device that you’d tie to your shoe and link to an app on your iPhone or iTouch, and it would record the number of steps you took, as long as you were wearing it and had your phone nearby. The iWatch has that built in, and as a watch wearer, you’d be wearing that pretty much all day, so the device will be at the very least able to record your walking pattern.
But what else can it revolutionalise?
Consider jogging. Remember the last time Apple revolutionalised jogging? Sure you do, before the millennium, you were jogging with a massive Walkman, or latterly, a Discman. The iPod came along and gave you less baggage to carry around with you. Then the iPhone came and made things a little bigger again, but that was still ok. Now, with the iWatch, things get even lighter. Your iWatch will be on your wrist, and your music will be broadcast to your buds via Bluetooth. No more annoying cables coming out of your ears to your phone! This means freer movement without worrying about dropping the device, or getting caught up in cables.
So, the iWatch does seem to be making a strong case to being the next gadget to change the way we live and interact with the tech world. But that’s not to say it’s without problems. Just recently, The Verge has reported that those with tattoos over their wrists are causing problems for the watch. It suggests that those tattoos, particularly with darker inks, are confusing the device into thinking it is not being worn. Because the device uses an infrared or green light through the skin to measure heart rate, it is unable to penetrate through the skin in order to make this measurement. As a consequence, the device shuts off of doesn’t measure what it’s supposed to measure.
As with any new technology, things like this will be fixed in future generations. The first generation of any new technology is fantastic to buy and show off, with its shortfalls well documented, and slowly eradicated over the next generations as the product is perfected. The smart phone is the perfect example of this, compare devices in the mid 2000s to today. Some big changes, but now the devices have plateaued somewhat and new breakthroughs tend to be mainly about speed, battery, and camera quality.
Also, the device isn’t without the potential for it to get broken or fail in some way. It may be on your wrist, and thus in a more secure place than your phone, but it is still bulky, and can be knocked with a swinging arm by accident. It experiences more movement as your hands and arms are much more animated than what a phone experiences in your pocket or in a holder. As a result, you may be in need of your broken iWatch to be replaced. But fear not, because the chances are it can be repaired. iPhonefixed.co.uk is an official repair agent of the iWatch, and your damaged unit can be repaired and sent back to you good as new. Furthermore, any damaged parts will be replaced by genuine Apple parts, or of equivalent quality, and is fully guaranteed for one year too.
You’d probably be very unlucky to smash the glass though. Check out this video to see how well built the glass is for example. Bricks, abrasive paper, even a drill couldn’t make a scratch on the glass, so you can see Apple have made a great start in producing a well built and solid device.
Overall, the iWatch marks an exciting new development into a new direction for mobile technology. The first generation produces the wow factor, the subsequent ones will only settle the technology down, and improve on it in terms of functionality, build, and design.