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.

Apple Watch can do many things, but it is first a wristwatch. Naturally, the watch face is the default screen of the device. It is customizable, but in order to do so you need to know a new touch screen interaction method called Force Touch. Basically, you press on the screen as if to push a stiff button. Once you do that on the watch face, you can browse through ten choices which includes various analog, digital, and celestial faces.

After choosing a watch face, it can be further customized. The complications around the time display can be set to show various information, which includes the day of the month, upcoming schedule, temperature, workout progress, and the phase of the Moon. Some of the elements of the watch can also have their colours changed and the styles of some of the analog faces can be altered.

At the time of the writing, 3rd party custom watch faces cannot be loaded into the watch. But the UI seems to suggest that this may become possible in the future; you can add or subtract the existing choices. Having ten choices with varying levels of tweaking might not leave a massive amount of choices, but at least they are pretty solid ones that can get you by for the time being.


I've talked about the locking of the watch previously. This happens if you set up a passcode and the device is removed from your wrist. As long as it's on your wrist, it assumes that the user is the rightful owner and stays unlocked.

If it does get locked, the time telling functionality is the only thing that remains functional. Attempting any interaction results in prompting for the passcode as you can see here. You can either enter the correct passcode, or unlock the paired iPhone to authenticate your identity and regain normal functionality.

Currently, like the rest of the wristwatches or smart watches, Apple Watch lacks an activation lock that prevents anyone stealing it from resetting it and using it as one's own. However, the passcode and lock should guard your personal information from someone trying to peek through the device.

This post should have been up much earlier, but thanks to a week-long business trip it was inadvertently delayed. Anyways, going back to the day I got the Apple Watch two weeks ago, I noticed that the longer sport band was pre-installed on my 42mm version. I have a relatively thin wrist, around 170 to 175mm circumference, which is at the lower end of the Apple's 165 - 195mm range for most men. So I felt that a shorter one would do just fine.

Switching the band was quite easy. I just pressed the button at the back of the watch near the band and the band was slid out smoothly. Then I inserted the shorter band into place, after which the button clicked and the band was locked.


With the right band in its place, I put the watch on my wrist. Initially, I had the pin on the 3rd notch from the end as you can see here. After a day, I felt that the watch was put on too tight - there was a bit of an ache where the watch's back pressed on my wrist. So the pin was put on the 2nd notch thereafter.

This was much more comfortable, as the Apple Watch was able to shift around the wrist more. But this occasionally made the watch go into the locked state because it thought that it was no longer touching the wrist (more about locking in another post).

Apple Watch first arrived at the hands of the regular users of the first wave countries in April 24, 2015. But it would not be sold at the Apple Store for the first few weeks, so either you had to get your order practically within seconds of the start of the pre-ordering back in April 10, or buy it at a handful of retailers that did get to sell them in the store at the launch. Because of this difficulty, apparently only a trickle have made over to Korea as of this writing, with the official launch date still unclear.

Meanwhile, my American friend Andy accidentally ordered two Apple Watches during the pre-order phase. His first choice, a silver Apple Watch Sport with green sport band, was slated to arrive between April 24 and May 8, but arrived at the launch day (April 24). He's been enjoying it since. His second choice, a space gray Apple Watch Sport with black sport band, was to arrive between May 13 and 27, but it arrived much sooner, on April 27. I asked him to ship the second one over to me, as I would pay him fully. He gladly accepted the offer, and sent it to Korea just after receiving it. Children's Day delayed the arrival a bit, but it finally came into my hands today.


I got to make this unboxing video soon after. You can see how one hand was recording the action and the other was furiously trying to open the box. Once everything was open, the full extent of what came with the package became visible. There's of course the watch itself, and the shorter lower strap for people with thinner wrist like me was also there. The magnetic wireless charger and a user manual was also included.


In the coming days, I'll post incremental reviews of the watch as I try to blend this into my daily life.