Wesley's Tool-Box

One of the key selling points of the Apple Watch is that it acts as a fitness tracker. Indeed, it knows how much you moved around, what your heart rate is throughout the day, and how many active calories were consumed as a result. These data are all collected on the Health app on the paired iPhone.

While the watch is supposed to automatically check your heart rate every ten minutes, you can manually check using the heart rate "Glance" that you pull up from the main watch screen. This manual checking, which generates about four to five data points while the screen is active, is also logged.

I should note that the Apple Watch OS 1.0.1 update seems to have messed up the automatic checking a bit. Sometimes the measurements for a certain period are not sent and lost; at times the watch simply forgets to take measurements for several tens of minutes at a time. The worst case I've seen was having about 4 hours' worth of log missing, although this is rare and usually it's 1 to 2 hours at most. The problem isn't unique to me and it seems that Apple knows of the problem, so I hope it's fixed in the next update.


Apple Watch's way of tracking, notifying, and displaying fitness data is through three rings - Move (red), Exercise (yellow), and Stand (blue). You set your daily goals for each of the rings and the progress is shown by how much complete the rings are. It's simple yet clear.

By default, the watch tells you how you're doing every four hours, or when one of the goals are met. As for the Stand, it'll tell you to get up and walk around for about a minute at the 50th minute of the hour if it sees that you didn't move much at all for the hour. If you decide to closely follow the Apple Watch's motivation and suggestions, getting the ring filled up is relatively easy and probably makes you a bit healthier, too. I'm personally getting to move around and exercise more as a result.

To be an effective fitness tracking device, the display would have to be good enough to be seen outdoors. Fortunately, Apple Watch had no problems at all - reading the exercise progress off the screen worked very well. The same couldn't be said for my Oband T2, however. Its screen becomes mostly unreadable outdoors, needing to shield the daylight with a hand to make out anything. So it was very refreshing for me to use the Apple Watch.


A separate app called Activity appears on the iPhone home screen to log the daily activity ring progress as soon as the pairing is done. Its visualization of the data is quite nice and consistent with the Apple Watch's counterpart. It made me wish a UI overhaul of the Health app even more.

When you achieve a certain fitness goal predetermined by Apple, you get a badge. This is shown on the watch's screen at the moment of the achievement, but the Activity app also lets you see them, along with others that you can get later if you try hard enough. Frankly though, the badges didn't really feel substantial to me. Completing all three rings each day felt more satisfying.

Which comes to the point - completing the yellow (Exercise) ring really meant putting some really effort into moving the body. You can see that I was able to complete two other rings daily, but not the yellow one. That's why I'll be taking a look at wearing the watch while exercising next.