For people who want to skip all the non-critical Apple praise and marketing regurgitation and don't want to spend their time filtering out the endless variety of framing devices Gruber uses to try to turn Apple's lemons into lemonaid here's a summary review:
- Using the watch as a watch is broken. He spends almost 1,000 words across 8 paragraphs talking about how broken it is. It may be accurate, but it's overly complex, fussy and unreliable to get it to show you the time.
- The water resistance is unacceptable for a device intended as a fitness companion, some of this is due to compromises to the overly complex design.
- As a watch targeting people who wear watches, it's probably a failure. He repeats some variation of this a number of times.
- the build quality feels high, not as high as the early press hands-on
- the rubber watch band is easy to size and the material feels good, but swapping out bands is "fiddly"
- the watch is designed to hide the bezel, but in good lighting you can see it, again reminding that it isn't a great watch
- the shape (square) is not a good watch shape
- the gender-neutral design comes off as modern
- battery life will get you through a day of moderate usage
- the induction charger is easy to use and works as advertised
- one of the main marketing points, that it's a health and fitness device, is not useful to him in any way and he has no interest in it
- some of the fitness features intrude into non-fitness uses in a bad way
- other fitness features seem pretty accurate and potentially useful
- the digital crown works basically like a mouse scroll-wheel
- touch, the crown and haptic feedback work as well as you'd expect and they work together well
- haptic feedback works so well that you can turn off sound for notifications
- he had a 50% failure rate on the haptic feedback on his test watches requiring him to get a replacement watch during his week-long review
- the digital touch features were untested, though he provides a cute story of two rich teenagers flirting in class he provides no actual coverage of the feature
tl;dr none of the smart watch features were particularly interesting and it's not a great watch to use for time keeping
It's not really surprising, it's the same problem all the smart watches have, it's not really clear that the extra expense and fuss of a smartwatch, on a severely compromised display and interaction platform is worth it. The target audience he holds out hope for, non-watch wearers who wouldn't know any better, are probably not going to start wearing an expensive fussy fiddly device that provides no unqualified benefit that they have to charge every day. I'm not a watch wearer and the only smartwatch I'd even consider is something like the Pebble and that's only because it's focused on
a) being a watch
b) notifications
c) not making me charge it all the time
Except that I'm literally surrounded by clocks nearly all the time, so I don't need to tell time. My phone already vibrates and makes sound, and it's usually letting me know something that I'm already being notified about on my monitor. The one use-case I can really see for a smartwatch is to help with navigation, especially while walking since walking around with your phone out getting turn-by-turn isn't all that great. But it's something I need literally once or twice per year.