Tired of packing around my bulky iPhone in my pocket to
track my runs, I started to look around at lighter
alternatives. Inevitably, I narrowed down my search to watches.
There are lots of different watches for athletes from companies
like Garmin, Fitbit, and Whoop. These got some pretty good
reviews, but they always felt very single purpose and my
assumption that the app ecosystem wasn't very developed, so
given enough time they would feel very limited. I noticed that
Apple was also marketing their watches for fitness use. The
reviews were ok, but there seemed to be a lot of momentum in
the apps and a good connection to the Apple ecosystem. I already
own an iPhone and use a MacBook, so I thought it would fit well
with what I already had.
I had a tough decision to make between the Apple Watch SE and the
Apple Watch Series 6. The SE seemed like all the watch I needed,
since I wasn't particularly interested in measuring my blood
oxygen levels. The Series 6 was supposedly faster, but I reasoned
that I wouldn't need a lot of processing for just tracking my runs
and listening to music. I might be wrong about that though.
So I got the SE. There are quite a few case and band colors, which
meant that I could customize it to the way I liked it. I wasn't
super excited about my final result, but I chalked that up to my
lack of creativity rather than the options available.
I found it a little awkward using the watch at first. It felt like
the first time I tried to do something non-trivial on a mobile phone.
I wanted more screen to see what I was doing and the UI was severely
limited compared to what I could do on the iPhone. I didn't even
understand how to get my apps on my watch. I thought that they would
automatically sync, but it turns out you have to sync them individually.
I guess syncing them individually is to accommodate the smaller resources.
I imagine if you have a lot of apps you could quickly fill up your
watch.
Once I got the apps installed, I started using them. I had been using
Runkeeper to track my runs previously, so I stuck with that. It was OK.
The apps on the watch definitely feel a lot buggier than the iPhone
counterparts. I also wanted to use Spotify to listen to music while I ran.
The funny thing about Spotify is that they did not allow you to stream
music through just the Apple Watch with a mobile connection. At the same
time, they didn't allow you to download to the phone. So if you wanted to
use Spotify, you had to have your iPhone nearby. This really negated the
entire purpose of buying the watch, since it would require now having
both a watch and an iPhone in my pocket. Ugh.
But, luckily, Spotify was working on streaming on the watch via cellular.
I got to enable it and listen to some music. Unfortunately, it is extremely
flakey. I'm not sure if it's the slow hardware on the phone, the bad network
connectivity or buggy Spotify software.