Apple Watch launch

donsullivan

Premium Member
Thanks for the info @donsullivan

Have you ordered a charging stand for yours yet?
I have not ordered a stand yet. I had preordered the Mophie one but they tried to pull a scam of charging my credit card and then announcing shipments were delayed to some indeterminate date. I immediately cancelled that order and decided to wait a little until items moved out of the 'coming soon' stage to actually shipping before I'll dive back in and start looking again.
 

wdwmagic

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I have not ordered a stand yet. I had preordered the Mophie one but they tried to pull a scam of charging my credit card and then announcing shipments were delayed to some indeterminate date. I immediately cancelled that order and decided to wait a little until items moved out of the 'coming soon' stage to actually shipping before I'll dive back in and start looking again.
Was going to go for that as well, but having read the review on macrumors today I am skipping it. They are saying it is really lightweight and even the weight of the cable can move it. Doesn't sound good, which is a shame, because it looks great.
 

donsullivan

Premium Member
Was going to go for that as well, but having read the review on macrumors today I am skipping it. They are saying it is really lightweight and even the weight of the cable can move it. Doesn't sound good, which is a shame, because it looks great.

I was desperate for something so I picked up one of the Mophie ones at BestBuy last night. It is indeed far too lightweight for the watch and a band. It feels like it's going to fall over whenever you do anything with it. The design is just fine, it's just simply too lightweight for the its intended purpose. I have to decide if I'm going to take it back or find a way to add some weight to the base.
 

wdwmagic

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I was desperate for something so I picked up one of the Mophie ones at BestBuy last night. It is indeed far too lightweight for the watch and a band. It feels like it's going to fall over whenever you do anything with it. The design is just fine, it's just simply too lightweight for the its intended purpose. I have to decide if I'm going to take it back or find a way to add some weight to the base.
Thanks for the first had report. That is a real shame, as it looks perfect. It just needs to bed early heavy weight. I guess the other option would be to use a 3M command strip or something similar underneath - but not ideal.
 

Dead2009

Horror Movie Guru
I never understood the need for a concept like this. The iPad i got, as it's essentially just a bigger iPod, but did we really need a watch? I can see people walking down the street and walking into something because they're too busy reading the news on their WATCH of all things.
 

wdwmagic

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I never understood the need for a concept like this. The iPad i got, as it's essentially just a bigger iPod, but did we really need a watch? I can see people walking down the street and walking into something because they're too busy reading the news on their WATCH of all things.
I don't think most people are using it for things like reading the news.

For me, it is primarily a watch - an extremely accurate timepiece. Secondly it is a notification device, I can get alerted of important things right there on the wrist. Third, I use it as a fitness tracker.
 

wdwmagic

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There is something about that I just don't like. If it's a good solution for you, then go for it. What color would you get?
Yeah it isn't great looking, but I think it might turn out to be one of the most practical in use. I would go black.
 

donsullivan

Premium Member
I never understood the need for a concept like this. The iPad i got, as it's essentially just a bigger iPod, but did we really need a watch? I can see people walking down the street and walking into something because they're too busy reading the news on their WATCH of all things.

The way you use the watch is totally and completely different than the iPhone or iPad. You don't spend all day looking at it, or spend long times reading things on it. It's designed to provide quick 'glances' at data to make you aware of something, not for you to heavily interact with it.

Here's an example of a use case when I was traveling on business 2 weeks ago:
- As I headed out the airport I got a notification on my watch of what gate my plane was departing from. Phone stayed in my pocket
- When I got to the airport, my boarding pass was on my watch so I just had that scanned by TSA; phone stayed in the pocket
- When I boarded the plane, again boarding pass on the watch; phone stayed in the pocket
- When I got to Atlanta we were doing the gate shuffle due to bad weather. The gate change alerts were coming to my watch as they happened (we had 3 that night) so even though I was having dinner I saw the alert quickly pop up that my gate had changed; phone stayed in the pocket

General in the office stuff
- I was in a meeting and I got an email notification on the watch. I glanced at the watch and saw the sender and subject and knew that it wasn't time sensitive and I could wait until later to deal with it. No taking my phone out, or worrying whether it might be important. A quick glance and then move on.
- I got an SMS message in a meeting later in the day. Again a quick glance at the watch showed me it was just a shipment notification from Amazon, nothing I needed to worry about. Didn't need to pull my phone out.

Payments
- I'm a fan of ApplePay for convenience but mostly for security. Now I don't need to pull my phone out to pay for lunch at Subway or the Ice Cream I got at Epcot on Saturday night; I just pass my watch over the terminal and the transaction completes; phone stays in the pocket.

All of these are simple things I admit, and there is absolutely no doubt they are all things I could have just pulled my phone out of my pocket to deal with. However, being able to just quickly glance at the watch for the info and move on is a convenience that's really hard to describe until you've used it for a few weeks in different use cases.

There is absolutely no doubt that a wearable device like this is not a necessity the way a smartphone has become in recent years. However the little niceties it presents to quickly get snippets of data throughout the day can be really useful. And once developers can really get there hands on it going forward I'm really looking forward to what some creative developers come up with for it.
 

lazyboy97o

Well-Known Member
I never understood the need for a concept like this. The iPad i got, as it's essentially just a bigger iPod, but did we really need a watch? I can see people walking down the street and walking into something because they're too busy reading the news on their WATCH of all things.
You're looking at this from the odd position that every product should be useful for any and all potential customers. For some people the iPhone or iPad make no sense, even if they did help define the contemporary smartphone and tablet markets. Even a different smartphone or tablet may not make sense. The wrist-worn communicator is an idea that goes back almost a century. There is obviously something about the idea people find fascinating.
 

wdwmagic

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Another thing to consider with the stands. If you want to use the new Night Stand mode, looks like it needs to be horizontal.

13168-7670-ed2aeae63c0ccdcbccaffbc97b15f337c230ba34_large_2x-l.jpg
 

TomHendricks

Well-Known Member
After much hand wringing, looking at a ton of different Apple Watch stands or combination stands, I finally made a decision. Here is the stand I chose,
61jNu0bT9sL._SL1000__zpswaczg0ar.jpg

It's $19.95 and I really like the way it looks. I wanted something to hold both my iPhone and Apple Watch and this is exactly what I was looking for. It's not suppose to ship till around July 15th, so I have a while before I actually get it. Once I do, I'll post some pics of it.
 

RonAnnArbor

Well-Known Member
So here's an interesting little update from this past week...Apple Watch and WDW...

Someday, maybe, My Disney experience will have an Apple Watch component -- right now it does not, so it makes it kind of worthless for the time being -- except for paying with Apple Pay -- but quite frankly, your magic band is already the same thing for payments if you are staying in the resort. I did use Apple Pay in a few places around the world. It did not work at Boatwrights. It did work at the shops in MK.

I found myself using the watch for my Boarding Pass on Delta -- worked fine, though coming home the MCO scanners at the gate are too small so you can't put your wrist under them to scan the code -- I ended up taking it off and then had to futz with the buttons to get the barcode back -- It worked as expected in Detroit, which has more modern check-in systems as its a Delta hub and brand new.

I did find that it was nice to have a quick reminder as fastpasses came along -- nice little haptic touch at alert time and off I went to Jungle Cruise (which then promptly closed because of weather). Again -- without the My Disney Experience component on the watch, you get notifications but NO system statuses and have to go back to your iPhone anyway.

I did like the ability to use Clear for tasks -- like my shopping list for the commissary, and a list of gifts I needed to pick up. Nice to have that on the watch and just flick them out of the way and not have to pull out the phone. I also liked using Hi-Def radar and having the weather maps on my wrist, as we had horrible weather for several days.

Overall -- I mostly found myself using the Apple watch as a watch -- which is not all that bad. it in no way replaces your Magic Band or your key card.
 

donsullivan

Premium Member
I have a hunch it will be a little while before something like this can be used in place of a Magic Band for admission, guest room access or FastPass entitlement.

In the Apple case, they do not allow developers access to the RFID chip in the devices yet, it's restricted for ApplePay use right now. I'm sure at some point in the future they'll be confident the security is rock solid around all of that and they might open it up to developers but no indications yet that is coming at least for the next year.

Not to mention, the customer base for smart watches of any kind is so small right now, it doesn't really make sense for it to be terribly high up the priority list for MDE development even if access to the RFID chip was available across all of the various platforms.

I'd rather see some development on adding Notification Services to the MDE app to trigger alerts on upcoming ADR's and FastPass or other items I've flagged in the app. That would automatically trigger an alert on the Phone and/or Watch (iOS or Android) for upcoming activities that I flagged which would benefit pretty much all users of MDE on a smartphone and smart watch if they happen to have one.
 

Clamman73

Well-Known Member
Did you load music on it or are you using as a remote for iTunes?
Remote for songs on my phone so far. I have a Disney playlist, 80s etc... I'm going to load a playlist on the watch and see how it works out with playing music directly to a Bluetooth speaker.
Really enjoying the watch more than I thought I would. Very comfortable too. Love the screen display on it.
 

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