"What Ambient Apple Watch Faces Might Look Like"

Matt Birchler has written a post on how he thinks Apple could implement an always-on Apple Watch face. In his post he describes and illustrates exactly how he thinks Apple could implement such a feature in the future.

One of the things on the very short list of things that Android Wear has over the Apple Watch right now is the ability to have always-on watch faces. All smart watches light up when you lift them to your face, but sometimes that’s not enough. If you want a smart watch that is always on, Android Wear has the advantage.

He’s right. Android Wear has this advantage and I think it’s one that’s sorely missing from watchOS. As John Gruber pointed out in his Apple Watch review, the Apple Watch is actually worse than a traditional watch because it does not give you the time as quickly since it relies on motion to activate the face:

I’ve worn a watch every day since I was in 7th grade, almost 30 years ago. I’m used to being able to see the time with just a glance whenever there is sufficient light. Apple Watch is somewhat frustrating in this regard. Even when Wrist Raise detection works perfectly, it takes a moment for the watch face to appear. There’s an inherent tiny amount of lag that isn’t there with a regular watch.

Some other specific examples. I was in New York last week, and stopped to have coffee with a friend in the afternoon. He had a meeting to get to, and I wanted to catch a 4:00 train home to Philadelphia. I was sitting on a low bench, leaning forward, elbows on my knees. It got to 3:00 or so, and I started glancing at my watch every few minutes. But it was always off, because my wrist was already positioned with the watch face up. The only way I could check the time was to artificially flick my wrist or to use my right hand to tap the screen — in either case, a far heavier gesture than the mere glance I’d have needed with my regular watch.

Birchler goes on and illustrates a few examples on how Apple could implement this feature using “ambient mode.” Ambient mode would be a mode in which much of the animations and colors of the Watch face are stripped in order to conserve battery. However, once your raise you wrist, all the tiny animations and colors would come back to life.

Because the Apple Watch uses and AMOLED display, it’s not hard to imagine Apple doing such thing since they can program the Watch to only light up specific pixels while the rest are off. In other smartwatches, such as the Moto 360, they have to still light up the entire face since they are currently still using LCD displays. Even then, however, the Moto 360 gets all day battery life.

There’s pretty much no excuse of Apple not to do this. I’m hoping we see this at WWDC, which is less than two months away. If not, I think we could see it in the second-generation Apple Watch.

You can check out Matt Birchler’s entire post here.