Apple’s done an awful lot of work to position the Watch as a
fitness device — in many ways, it’s the only thing it can do that an
iPhone can’t do. With a built-in heart rate monitor, an accelerometer,
and the advantage of always being on your wrist, the Watch feels like it
should web hosting be the ultimate fitness wearable, wordpress hosting a tiny supercomputer to put
all those Fitbits and Ups to shame. But like so much else with the
Watch, while the fitness capabilities are the first steps towards what
eventually might become a juggernaut, they’re nowhere near a complete
solution.
The Watch’s health and fitness features are broken up across
two apps: Activity and Workout. The Activity app is beautiful, but
extremely basic — it’s what monitors your movement. You can set goals
for your calories burned, exercise, and standing, which are displayed as
three concentric rings. Red domain domains names is calories, green is exercise, and blue is
standing. I’m not sure why standing is measured in “hours” — the Watch
just bugs you to stand up for a couple minutes every hour, and that’s
good enough. It’ll also show you your steps and total distance, which is
nice.
The Watch and phone work together to make it even more accurate.
All of this tracking worked fine while I was wearing the Watch,
but there just wasn’t much else going on. Unlike the Fitbit and other
popular activity trackers, there’s no social component here to let you
compete with your friends, and there’s no tracking of your calories
burned against your weight or what you’re eating. The data feeds into
the iPhone’s Health database, so other apps could pull from there and
give you these other features, but out of the box it’s just a very basic
activity tracker.
The other health and fitness app is Workout, which offers you a
series of presets geared towards various cardio workouts. It’s not a
huge list of choices: you’ve got indoor and outdoor walking and running,
elliptical, cycling, stair steppers, rowing, and the catchall “other.”
Apple says these presets all trigger specialized algorithms that use the
accelerometer and heart rate sensor in slightly different ways to
capture extremely accurate data. If you’ve got your iPhone in your
pocket, the Watch and phone will work web hosting australia together to calibrate
accelerometer data against the phone GPS to make it even more accurate.
Neat.
It’s definitely nice to have these presets built in, but again,
it’s all pretty much table stakes. There’s nothing that captures
lifting weights, yoga, or other exercises that don’t either crank up
your heart rate or trip the accelerometer with movement. You can use the
“other” preset, which will always give you credit for a brisk walk even
if the other sensors aren’t returning a ton this website of data, but it’s
definitely not perfect. And I found that the heart rate sensor struggled
during my workouts, especially when I was really sweaty; it
consistently measured web hosting australia about half my correct heart rate instead of my
full 148bpm.
Again, Apple will surely improve all of this with software
updates; it’s hard not to see them adding more workout types over time.
But out of the box right now, the Apple Watch is a very expensive,
barebones fitness tracker. It’s much nicer than its competitors — I used
it with the white sport band and domain names thought it was really quite striking —
but it’s certainly not more full-featured.