VentureBeat Apple Watch Review: Negative And On-Point

Because WatchAware is dedicated to being the best Apple Watch outlet anywhere, we’re obviously biased in our enthusiasm for the thing. However, we strive to remain as objective as possible inside that built-in bias, and I think we do a pretty good job of it. I for one have lots of problems with this little revolutionary gizmo, and I’m not averse to agreeing with a negative critique — or handing them out myself (which is coming, mind you) — whenever I deem it accurate and apt. After all, Apple’s never made a perfect product, so there’s always going to be room for improvement. And constant improvement is all any of us really want.

All this is to say that one of our current tasks is almost painfully meta: reviewing Apple Watch reviews.

However, all this isn’t to say that we’ll pan a “bad” review and laud a “good” one. Because honestly, what makes a review accurate and insightful isn’t the individual reviewer’s personal pick on yay or nay (particularly when they’re reviewing Apple’s “most personal product” ever), but rather their method in reaching those conclusions. Popular YouTube celebrity MKBHD, for example, screwed the pooch — and his 2.5 million subscribers — on his “definitive” review base overview of Apple Watch, but he was generally favorable. In this way, a “good” review sometimes isn’t.

Similarly, a “bad” review is sometimes among the best ones you’ll read, even if you’re in love with the product in question. That’s how I felt about Gizmodo’s take, and that’s how I feel about this in-depth piece from VentureBeat’s Mark Sullivan. In it, Sullivan explains what it means to be a responsible tech reviewer:

I’ve had my Watch for a month now, and I’ve worn it every day, showered with it, run with it, worked out with it, walked around town with it, slept with it, driven with it, worked with it, and socialized with it.

Instead of talking about how the Watch looks on paper, or about how well this feature or that works in a vacuum, my goal is to give you an idea of how well my Watch helped me stay on top of my life on a day-to-day basis.

That’s both the minimum and the maximum that any reader ought to demand, particularly when it comes to a device like Apple Watch, which will invariably define an entire here-to-stay (but still very immature) product category.

Here are the main negatives Sullivan presents with which I agree:

When you’re first setting up your Watch, Apple asks if you want to mirror the the apps and notifications settings on your phone. Wanting to get through the setup process, I answered Yes to that without really considering what that might mean for the volume of notifications.

This is a real issue. We’ve written about it in the past, and we hope (and assume) Apple fixes it ASAP.

The button by the crown pulls up a quick group of your social contacts. You can click on these to initiate calls (on your iPhone) or to dictate text messages. I didn’t hit that button very much, and I’m a bit surprised that Apple’s designers dedicated a large button just for enabling limited communications with a small group of contacts.

Yup. Unless developers find unique, compelling uses for this button (and unless Apple makes it user-mappable and/or has huge plans for it down the road, Apple Pay notwithstanding), I don’t think we’ll be seeing it on Apple Watch 2.

Siri on the Watch is the dumb stepsister of Siri on the phone. Sitting in a quiet room it works well, but I’ve found that out in the real world the service failed at important times. Also, Siri on the Watch can’t talk. …

When Siri misinterpreted the word, I found no straightforward way of clearing the error and restating the word (or, perhaps, spelling it) to the Watch. Instead, I had to delete the whole text message and start over. If that one problem word was essential, I had to pull out my phone to type it in.

Annoying. To. The. Max.

In theory you can talk to someone using the little microphone and speaker in the Watch. But it just doesn’t work very well. Even in completely quiet environments with no background noise or wind, the calls sounded crackly and far way. Same way on the other end, I’m told.

My experience has been largely the same so far, but I tend to give tiny mobile speakers a bigger pass than I probably should in 2015. I find phone calls on Apple Watch to be adequate for emergencies (and emergencies of convenience), but I agree that the experience could be better. I also expect that it will be come the next generation.

You can’t sleep with the Watch because you have to charge it every night. If Apple didn’t mean for you to be able to leave your Watch on while you’re sleeping, why did it include the alarm clock function? (It’s actually quite cool to be awoken by a gentle buzz at your wrist.)

Right now, for naps and all the other things you might need alarms and timers for (even though they don’t always work properly). But there is a new rumor that the next (first) Apple Watch software update might have a Sleep app on tap. To make use of it, you’ll have to do what I do with all my mobile devices: charge them before bed. Still, I think it’s curious that Apple Watch shipped without a sleep tracker in the first place, though I understand it was probably to gauge public reaction re: battery life in order to more elegantly advertise such a “limited” feature. I haven’t had battery issues with my Apple Watch yet (42mm), though I have no qualms with folks who give the thing a fair shake and still have those longevity complaints.

Overall, Sullivan gave an honest, detailed account of why Apple Watch isn’t right for him. And even though he’s 100 percent correct, he got as crushed in the comments as you’d expect. But those folks would do well to compare Sullivan’s take with this garbage from Engadget, and then maybe they’d understand the difference between a bad review and a bad review.