After the first full day of wearing the Apple Watch, some observations from my experience:
- First thing in the morning, it seemed like the Watch had not captured any sleep data (or my sleep quality was so bad it declined to share it with me). Later in the day, I turned my iPhone back on (I had turned it off before going to bed last night) and synced with the Pillow phone app, which showed me that I had done some tossing and turning over the course of about 5 1/2 hours for a sleep score of 52%. I'm not sure what a baseline would be, but I assume 52% is pretty terrible, so that's something to improve on.
- Even without being within range of the iPhone for most of the day, teh activity tracker did a good job tracking what I was doing at the office. I have a standing desk, so I hit the stand-up goal with ease. The calorie goal (which was kind of an arbitrary choice on my part, as the Fitbit tracks total calories burned rather than active calories burned) is about 2/3 done, and the exercise goal is far from complete, but at 8 of 30 minutes I am curious what it detected as exercise -- maybe my walk to and from the car!
- I started the day with 45% battery and ended the day with 13% battery. This will be something to keep an eye on, but I wonder if it was spending a lot of energy trying to find the iPhone.
- After some research, I did discover some anecdotal indication that the Apple Watch could work with Android, though in at least one article the watch in question was the previous generation and one of the models that supported cellular, so I expect my mileage to vary. It also required some of the features I'm curious about (SMS alerts and phone calls) to be set up on the iPhone with a SIM card, so Phase 2 of the experiment may involve me switching back to the iPhone for a brief period. More on that in at least a week.
A further note on the initial setup: it does require an iPhone. In fact, when you first power on the Watch, the only thing it displays is a request to bring the watch near your iPhone, at which point a popover appears on the iPhone screen offering to pair with the Watch. This popover appeared on my iPhone 6 despite not being on the required iOS version (12), but it did indicate that I had to upgrade to continue. (The Apple Watch box also notes that an iPhone 5s or later running iOS 12 is required.)
So far, this is the only thing that has truly required the iPhone, though I will keep the iPhone on and near the bed tonight to see if that helps PIllow track my sleep.