[This is an updated version]

After a few supply chain hiccups, the Apple Watch is now in the wild. I’ve had mine since April 24th, enough time to educate my opinion: Is this a truly new genre or simply an elegant version of a gratuitous accessory?

Technology reviewers — and customers — come in two species: Cats and Dogs. When presented with a new brand of cat food, our feline masters tiptoe suspiciously around the offering and, having carefully sniffed their human servant’s token of devotion, finally deign to sample it.

Dogs have no such sense of decorum and hierarchy, they joyously snarf up the mystery meal.

I’m a geeky dog, I happily jump on new tech products. But, as the advertising industry is fond of asking: Will fido return to the bowl? Does the interest last after the hunger for novelty has been sated?

The bottom line is mostly good news: After five weeks, I find my new Sport Apple Watch well-made, useful, and pleasant. I think it will place Apple in the defining position in the emerging Smartwatch category. But mostly good news implies rough moments, bugs and shortcomings.

First, some disclaimers and calibrations:

This isn’t a Definitive Review. I don’t get review units, I buy products with my own money, no OPM involved. Here, no I like/don’t like, therefore you should like/not like or buy/don’t buy.

This isn’t a rush to judgment; I’ve learned to be wary of my first impressions. I recall my first mistaken views of the iPod (not a chance in a commoditized MP3 player market), Windows Vista (great UI, much better than Windows XP), and the iPad (disappointing, can’t do what a Mac does…). I now prefer to take the time to let a Third Impression sink in. With a little luck, it will be close to actual users’ Word of Mouth, the irreplaceable success/failure factor that’s much more powerful than any marketing campaign.

I’ll start with the Apple Watch User Guide. In typical Apple fashion, the Guide is a cleanly styled document, but it fails in a number of ways. The first and most important is that it stumbles over itself to get to the “fun stuff” without first defining the ingredients and orienting the user.

I once worked at a computer company called Data General where I learned that a technical manual, geeky as it might be, should be an advocate for the reader. The DG manuals always started with a chapter titled “Concepts and Facilities”: Here’s the big idea, here are the building blocks that go into it, here’s what they do…

Laying out a “Concepts and Facilities” for the Apple Watch isn’t difficult. Borrowing from Horace Dediu’s The Battle For The Wrist and Ben Thompson’s Apple Watch And Continuous Computing, and having followed a path similar to Farhad Manjoo’s Bliss, but Only After a Steep Learning Curve, I now have a structured mental picture:

The Main Display. The ever-present watch face and its “complications” (a term inherited from traditional watchmaking) that provide the date and time, weather, alarms and timers, stock quotes…

“Glances”: A series of personalized, quickly-accessed views that display your heart rate, schedule, Maps, music playback controls…

Applications: One click of the Watch crown to get to any of your apps.

Notifications: Pings from apps such as Messages, voice mail, and Uber.

Siri: Voice input that triggers activities that are difficult to manage through the small screen, such as dialing a call, looking for a place on the map, or replying to a message.

Through trial and error, I get the hang of the key building blocks and their customizations through the companion app on the iPhone. Once I’m there, life becomes much more pleasant, but the journey wasn’t easy, and it gives me an idea for another Watch User Guide chapter: Traps and Gotchas (or How to Avoid Disappointment and Frustration).

For example: On the second day of my tribulations, the battery ran out in about eight hours. Upon inspection, I realized that a number of auto-installed, third-party applications were receiving their entire suites of default notifications…which I had inadvertently muted. All of that unseen/unheard traffic took the battery down.

After paring down the notifications to just the ones that I cared about, battery life now easily exceeds the 18 hours specified on Apple’s site, a nice surprise given my paranoid thoughts before I actually used the Watch.

Speaking of third-party apps, I found a nice app called PCalc that demonstrates a well-judged adaptation to the size and UI of the new device, with functions such as calculating a tip and splitting a restaurant bill…

…but for now I agree with the general sentiment that Watch apps are either not very useful or they’re annoying, or both. I removed most of them, even The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal whose article snippets were unattractive and unreadable. I assume better examples will emerge as the developer tools (and lore) mature.

The Watch’s homegrown apps are better — the Apple Pay implementation, in particular, is very well done — although there’s room for improvement. The Activity app works quite well under most circumstances, but I ran into trouble when I wanted to monitor my heart rate in real time during a trainer-led session at the gym.

The Watch takes your pulse by analyzing the fluctuating reflections of the shining green LEDs on the back of the watch face. To conserve battery life, measurements are automatically taken at distant intervals, 10–15 minutes, or even an entire hour, as I just found out. It takes 10 to 15 seconds to get a single measurement — and then the LEDs promptly shut off.

To get a permanent reading, one must use a device such as a chest heart-rate monitor. For this, I bought a $59.95 Wahoo Fitness Tickr at the Apple Store…but how do I connect it? Surprisingly, the User Guide doesn’t mention that the Bluetooth settings contains a Health Devices section. After some digging, I get the devices coupled, the Tickr monitor connects without ado, and my Watch shows me permanent heart-rate monitoring without draining the battery… until it disconnects and refuses to reconnect. The following day, it reconnects and disconnects again. (I contacted Wahoo Fitness Customer Support three weeks ago but haven’t heard back from them.)

There are the usual and expected first-generation system glitches, such as the companion iPhone welcoming me with a completely dark screen.

A few hits on the Home button cures the problem.

Also, the Watch sometimes fails to pick up an incoming call when I hit the green button on the screen, although when it does connect, the sound quality is surprisingly good.

Another annoyance, although perhaps it’s just my slightly misaligned carpal bones (the result of an impatience during a healing process 40 years ago): When I wear the Watch on my left wrist, it frequently thinks it has been removed and demands the passcode. No such trouble on my right wrist.

These bugs and shortcomings don’t detract from my overall impression that the Apple Watch is a useful and pleasant device that acts as a convenient, customizable companion to the iPhone in my pocket. It’s not perfect, but let’s recall the first iPhone eight years ago: No native apps, no cut-and-paste, no accented characters, so-so call quality, short battery life, no choice of colors or styles… Compared to the 2007 iPhone, the Apple Watch with its array of models and bands shows deep thought and quality execution.

— JLG@mondaynote.com