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.

Probably the biggest passive use (relatively) for a smart watch or band would be relaying the notifications from the paired smartphone. The biggest draw-in for me in getting an Oband T2 smart band a few months ago while waiting for the Apple Watch was precisely because it was able to show notifications from an iPhone. But that device did the job barely, and not very consistently, so the $25 investment was less than satisfactory.

Of course, Apple knows its products and the way Apple Watch handles the iPhone notifications is quite smooth. When there's a new notification, Apple Watch gently taps your wrist. When you look at the screen, it displays the information with a nice UI and a very legible font. In my experience, Apple Watch pretty much takes over all the notifying job as long as it's on your wrist and Do Not Disturb is not set. When you're done, you can either press Dismiss("확인" in Korean, as seen in the picture) or pull the notification down and it'll go away.


If the notifications did come to the device, but for some reason you didn't read them, a red dot appears on the top center of the screen by default. If several notifications are waiting, a list of them is shown in an orderly fashion. Tapping one of them reveals the full contents.

Interestingly, when the Do Not Disturb is set, Apple Watch simply does not receive any notifications from the iPhone. It does not silently keep them and remind you later - they remain on the phone. This probably helps with the battery life and thus I think the decision is reasonable. Also, if you're actively using the iPhone, notifications are not passed to the watch either, likely to reduce redundancy.