Apple Watch – Specs, features, price, release date and everything you need to know

The Flint Center erupted this morning when Tim Cook mentioned the classic tagline “One more thing…” and as everyone expected, it was a new Apple product, a wrist watch. However it is not called the iWatch, as most believed, but just the Watch or the Apple Watch.

Apple went on for an hour about the new stuff in Apple Watch and it seems to take more than that to go through all that is given on its subsite. So here a brief update on the things you really should know about the Apple Watch.

Design

The Apple Watch sports a square design, with a crown and a button on the right side. It brings an advanced latching mechanism for straps, which makes changing them super easy.

It comes in two sizes – 38 mm and 42 mm, each sporting a Retina Display. The glass is made of Sapphire crystal and is pressure sensitive in addition to being a touch screen. The Apple Watch is made of custom alloys for beauty and durability, and also supports wireless charging.

Interface

The watch face is intelligent and lights up only when you pull up your wrist. Besides, it is highly customisable to show an analog or digital face, weather, notifications, workout stats, solar system, photos etc and you can choose from many more.

The homescreen mainly consists of a series of colorful round icons which can be navigated by rotating the crown on the side, so that it doesn’t disrupt your view (and that is why there is a crown for the digital watch). Each app adapts to occupy the limited space and it is worth noting that there is no available keyboard.

Timekeeping

And coming to what watches did before they turned smart, the Apple Watch is accurate to a scale of 50 milliseconds. It also features the standard Timer, Alarm clocks and Stop Watch functionalities.

Features – What you can do with it?

Oh boy, its a really long list. But here are some which I found to be exciting.

Notifications: First of all, it gives you notifications from your iPhone and alerts you with vibrations. Not only native apps, but third party apps can also make use of this feature and provide custom responses using the new extensions in the WatchKit.

Health Kit: Apple Watch tracks your movements even as standing, walking, running and up the stairs, and the Activity app shows your progress and motivates you to do more. The Apple Watch also gets your heart beat and can send it to your loved ones.

Maps: The Maps app give turn-by-turn instructions by vibrating differently to right and left turns. That is really cool!

Connect with friends and family: Remember the button I said earlier, the one below the crown? Yeah that one is dedicated just for connecting with contacts. But how you do this is rather odd! Once you select a person, you can draw something or select an emoji or record a voice message and send, because there is no dedicated keyboard.  Not sure if users are gonna like that.

Walkie Talkie: Use Apple Watch as a walkie-Talkie to send short voice messages to friends near you. I have a feeling that College exams are going get a lot easier.

Apple Pay: Apple Pay is a new payment system from Apple which helps you do all the shopping securely without swiping your credit card or entering card details. And in addition to the new iPhones, Apple Watch will also make use of  this technology. Basically, on supported stores and hotels, you can just show your Watch in front of a sensor to open doors or to make purchases.

Control content: Besides all these features, the Apple Watch can also control the Apple TV and iTunes library, iPhone’s Stop watch, Timer, Alarms, Music and Settings. It also has Siri and doubles as your iPhone camera’s view finder!

Read more on the features.

Compatibility

For many, the bummer would be that the Apple Watch is not a standalone watch but works only with an iPhone. In fact, only iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus are supported.

Variety and Customisability

This is area where Apple tries to score with the Apple Watch, as they are bringing as much variety as possible. Though unusual from Apple, it seems to be a necessity in the watch industry. Besides the two available sizes, the Apple Watch has 3 Collections, 6 straps and a customisable interface. Apple claims it would amount to a possible two million different combinations so that your friend’s watch will never look the same as yours.

Battery Life on Apple Watch

It stunned many when Apple kept mum on the battery life of the Apple Watch even after boasting about the Wireless Charging ability. And this has lead to the speculation that the late availability of the the watch is due to some Battery issues Apple is facing.

Price and availability

Right now, we only know that the pricing starts at $399. We have no idea how much the price will vary with the size, with the collections or how much the straps would cost. Also you won’t be able to buy the Apple Watch along with your iPhone 6 purchase because it is only “Coming in early 2015”.

So that was an overview of the features, price and release date of the Apple Watch. You can get more details on their website.