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Gear to help you along - Mark McNamee looks at Wearable Technology - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2015

Notifications
This is the primary objective of any smart watch or wearable technology. To allow you to quickly triage incoming information and action them accordingly. Firstly you can filter out which apps actually notify via your watch, instantly filtering out noisy apps, we're looking at you, Facebook and LinkedIn!

It also means you can put your phone on silent, eg when in meetings, but don't miss important text messages or calls you really need to take. If they catch on enough it may even sound the death knell for horrendous ring tones, we live in hope!!

And the claimed 18-hour battery life?
It's actually fine for 'all-day use', even if you track your exercise for a couple of hours and use it to take a few calls throughout the day, it will typically still have 20-30% charge left by bedtime. Yes, you need to charge it every night, but most smartphone users are ok with that.

Speaking of the charger, it's a magnetically attached inductive affair. It works well, albeit taking a good few hours to achieve a full charge. This, of course, is fine when charged overnight. The new software (coming out in autumn) brings a dedicated night-stand mode, turning it into a very small but expensive travel alarm clock.

This WatchOS 2 update also promises some other useful features, key ones being the ability to reply to emails directly from your watch, and to use known Wifi networks when the phone is out of range. It also allows apps to run natively on the watch, currently all the logic runs on the phone via Bluetooth. This should speed up third-party apps which would be welcome.

One feature you'll probably never use in the current incarnation is the photo library. You can choose which images are to be stored on the phone, but looking at them on a one-inch screen is fairly pointless. There's hope for creativity yet though - the new OS will allow you to use your own Gear to help you along Mark McNamee looks at Wearable Technology photos as a watch face, opening up a whole heap of possibilities, Big Ben or the Liver Building clock as your watch anyone?

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1st Published 01/08/2015
last update 09/12/2022 14:54:37

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