Short  Watch Thoughts - III The Missing Magic

Two things made the original iPhone so incredible:¹

1. It could do incredible things that no “phone” had ever done before.
2. It did a very good job of disguising the slow things that it couldn’t do well right off the bat. (think checker box web views in original Safari)

I think that the Apple watch compares very favorably on item #1, but too often fails at #2 (thinking spinner when trying to launch the simplest of apps). Additionaly, it may be that the acceptable delay is shorter than it is on a phone, since we are so accustomed to responsive phones, and because holding your arm up while looking at a postage-stamp sized screen quickly becomes unpleasant.

Obviously, passing data between the phone and the watch is REALLY hard to do. I wouldn’t suggest otherwise. But that is the constraint around which Apple either needs to impose a simpler paradigm on its users, or figure out how to fake it magically. This is the type of minor detail that so often gives users and fans a small moment of catching their breath when Apple seems to pull off something impossible.²

Here’s a dumb idea inspired by my thinking about the delay in text parsing: maybe, any time a user initiates anything that takes more than half a second, there is a system-based guarantee that if the user drops their wrist and doesn’t move on, that the watch will give them a designated tap them to indicate that the app/action is ready for use. It would at least solve the problem of users feeling frustrated waiting an unknown amount of time with their arm propped up like Walter Kornbluth. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but it has a lot of appeal for me.