brianmcdoogle said:

I think the Siri face is just a battery drain. Is anyone else noticing this for that particular face?

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Moreche said:

I’ve had my series 3 since launch and I think I’m ready to sell it. I’m at the conclusion that I think wearables are a mistake and something we’ll look back at in the future and think WTF.
I feel they’re trying to fill a gap that does need filled.

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Zeyphersan said:

Time for the write up about my experiment!

First full day with my series 3, and I decided to spend it without my phone. Just left it at home while I went to school and ran some errands. Off the charger and on my wrist at 10:50am, doing my write up now about six hours later. Let’s see how the day went:

Right off the bat, the night before I had synced about 400 songs to my watch. It automatically grabbed My Favorites Mix, My New Music Mix, My Chill Mix, and Heavy Rotation, which includes a playlist of over 300 songs. It took forever but I was sleeping so who cares. The fact that these will auto-update while charging is really convenient.

Goes without saying that podcast support would be that much better. But I guess we’re waiting for watchOS5 at the earliest.

I was able to pair my watch to the Bluetooth receiver in my car. I know at the moment the watch isn’t able to pair with car radios because they can’t exchange more information and stuff, but my car is older and only has auxiliary in, so I get around that by using a SoundBot, Bluetooth receiver that plugs into aux. Watch sees it as just a generic Bluetooth speaker, which means I didn’t have to drive in silence or worse, listen to the radio. That was super simple. Outside the car I have AirPods which work so naturally with the watch, unsurprisingly. Pleasant experience to find that whatever I set as the tap options in iOS11 work just the same, and that Siri talks back to you! And is a lot faster.

Went through school, responding to texts and messages like nothing was going on. LTE speeds are surprisingly fast! I was checking off some stuff in my to-do app of choice, Things. I reloaded my Starbucks card using on-Watch Apple Pay, then used said card at a store. I made a call to my doctor to make an appointment. I got directions to a UPS store to return a package.

Things I was impressed by:

1. Music quality, everything sounded great and I had no cutouts.
2. How fast this thing is, even over a network
3. I feel like Scribble recognition has gotten better, but my last watch was having tons of software issues so maybe the last one was just jacked up
4. I got all notifications from my phone, even ones that didn’t have a watch version. From what I could tell notification actions would have still worked and sent the result back to my phone, which is awesome.

Things that just didn’t work:

1. Some apps have no concept of the network at all, ie Facebook messenger just doesn’t load anything.
2. So while SMS works just as expected, it turns out the watch can’t do anything with MMS. I was in a couple group chats, both MMS instead of iMessage, and each reply would come back in a separate thread for that person instead of just the MMS thread. This isn’t an issue when paired with the phone so I’m assuming this is just a consequence of how SMS relay works, and hopefully it can be ironed out.
3. No way to create new contacts. I know this is a niche use, but I was trying to get some numbers from classmates for a project and had to use my iPad to do it, which I bring for schoolwork anyway.

Other small annoyances:

1. I love how find my friends switches your location to the watch when on its own, but it doesn’t seem to respect that location for HomeKit stuff. I have a number of scenes to turn off lights when I leave and turn them back on when I come home, neither of which did anything because my phone was located in my room the whole time and didn’t do anything
2. Calendar doesn’t go past 13 days. I thought there was no way to add a new event which impacted the appointment I was making with my doctor but I learned after the fact that Siri will still be able to do it if you go through her, even for days more than 13 out. Siri cannot add contacts, though.
3. Some commands that have the right app and work on the phone just don’t on the watch. I follow a number of people on Find My Friends and while I can ask my phone “where is [person]?”, and the watch has a FMF app, the command isn’t valid there.
4. Even though apps will open and do stuff, like Things, some functionality still requires the phone to complete. Also stuff that can be patched later.

Overall I’m very impressed, and aside from two scenarios where I needed my iPad to do something I would have used my phone for (making the calendar event and getting new contacts) I could have done the whole day with just my watch and been fine.

Now, battery life. My school has WiFi which all my devices connect to, but because it has a login and certificate requirement the watch cannot hop on. As such I was on LTE the whole time, with no WiFi at all. LTE takes noticeably more battery than WiFi does. My watch found its way to 25% after six hours of use, a lot of that music streaming to my AirPods and car. Obviously this is still very much a companion device.

Look forward to doing this again for gym trips and small trips around town!

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Moreche said:

I’ve had my series 3 since launch and I think I’m ready to sell it. I’m at the conclusion that I think wearables are a mistake and something we’ll look back at in the future and think WTF.
I feel they’re trying to fill a gap that does need filled.

Click to expand...

bodyofanamerican said:

Anyone else have issues with a sticky Digital Crown? It’s difficult to turn unless I run it under a cold tap, then a few hours later back to the same shit of having a lot of resistance when trying to turn it and barely clicking.

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Jtwo said:

Aw man I played with an s3 at Target for a few seconds today.... o.o
I.... the s0 is NOT at all like that. it feels like a different product.


almost wish i didnt know

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