Does Jon have space on his wrist for Apple Watch?

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.busy's weekly news digest for the week ending the 24th of april 2015. my name is john jordan hi um so obviously the big news this week was um after the big news two weeks ago the apple watch was being pre-ordered now it's the apple watch is is out so um a certain number of millions of people around the world work up excitedly to uh to receive their pre-orders and it seems to still be that the uh the ones that kind of came out or definitely today were the 38 millimeter kind of sports watch kind of ones they seem to be the ones with them obviously cheapest ones i guess probably the highest highest amount of production on them um and um and uh so everyone who has them is now frantically unboxing and tweeting and doing all those kind of things i guess it's kind of um it's kind of more interesting to a degree for majority people who don't have them kind of seeing how the ecosystem changes so on

pocket gamer um doctors we've been kind of tracking um the some of the games that have been announced this is a bit difficult before um the actual watch comes out because some people won't really want to talk about stuff that's coming out um and equally as we've kind of said before the watch it's not really a kind of a strong kind of user case that games are going to be a core app in the way that they have um been and uh for phones and tablets so we kind of wait and see but i think we got up to about i think we're about 29 at the moment there's a few we could drop off as a few we could add on so probably up to about maybe about 40 games i think they were announced it's kind of interesting though what we're kind of seeing is there's a few games that are kind of games in the sense that they they run majority on the phone and have some sort of um iphone um kind of support to do kind of other functionality often doing in-app purchases but looking at leaderboards and that kind of stuff um but there's quite a lot of games now coming out so ubisoft seems to be one that's doing this quite a lot it's having companion apps so um quite how um

useful this will be um sorry i mean i used to ubisoft that's kind of freudian is it's gameloft i mean um so gameloft have released some what they call companion apps for um brothers in arms three and um uh modern combat uh five you get the numbers right and asphalt eight so they all have kind of some functionality more really notifications so i guess we're kind of going to see this interesting situation where for most of the big apps that are happening on on on the apple watch it's kind of kind of getting the balance of providing kind of real-time notifications but not too much information so kind of saying something's happening you know you can maybe see some information here but probably now kind of time to get your phone and do something kind of a bit more um kind of in-depth on the phone so game gaming that's why gaming kind of sits in a weird place i think with the apple watch but anyway um so i have to say kind of i was one of those those lucky um millions who who woke up rather although i woke up whether um belatedly and went back to sleeping in authors despite my watch arriving so i do have one i'm actually quite a fan of watches

so um so i have i have already have some watches you can see some watches here so there's some watch watches that tell the time there's a there's a pebble here and obviously this hasn't been charged up for a while so but a pebble is effectively the first kind of smartwatch that gained a million users um we have a what else we have we have a a nike plus running watch so i've had one of those for um about two and a half years now so every time i go running i have that um that's pretty um pretty uh kind of core to my fitness regime and have one of these as well which is can i argue with whether this is a watch or not this is a fitbit um charge uh heart monitor built in as well so i've had a various fitbits over the years um and this is something um it's not really a watch it's a it's a health monitor and you wear it all the time so obviously the nike running watch you just wear when you run it's pretty chunky things got gps built in and tracks your watches traction runs this one is just um basically tracks movement that has a heart rate monitor built into it you and also most importantly track sleep so here we have on on this one we have the

apple watch so combination um so let's see if we can get this one to start pretty difficult for you guys to see there but there we have a little heavy little butterfly um but what you can kind of see immediately um this is the small one this is a 38 millimeter one there's a 42 millimeter one slightly bigger um but obviously lovely screen you probably can't see it but um so we see the time and the date there but very quickly that's kind of like uh kind of going off to kind of stop battery life so you have this kind of interesting scenario with the apple watch where you know it's a nice piece of hardware um battery life is clearly an issue um that they're that they're kind of um kind of dealing with we'll kind of wait to see when people start using these and getting a lot of notifications and kind of quite how in fact that impacts battery life and the reason i kind of mentioned that is not so much that we're kind of used to charging our phones overnight now um and the smart watches have been out today on android where we've been charging those overnight as well but one of the key things i think a lot of people will be using or looking to use apple watch for is this kind of fitness um kind of sensors type stuff which it does has a heart rate monitor built into it um so it can track that all the time

and obviously you can track activity and famously well if you've been sitting down for an hour it'll give you notification to stand up for a minute or something you know this whole tim cook sitting his new cancer kind of meme that he started off um obviously one of the big issues for the apple watch is at the moment um i mean it's i think it's fairly small it's kind of yeah i say this is the smaller one but it's not a big watch by any means whereas the trend has been to get kind of for fashion to get bigger watches um so it's i think it's small enough that you could wear it um in when you were asleep um but obviously the issue is battery life um but the problem they have is they can't track sleep um which is a key part of fitness and health so we'll kind of i guess wait to see how how in in future years the the apple watch kind of evolves um just just quickly before i kind of go a bit more in depth into kind of what's happening with the games on it i will point out my favorite bit of the approach so far is is the box so this is the box it came in and this is the kind of like the uh the case and i would almost say i'm not a particularly big fan a fan of apple industrial design when it comes to the

actual devices of the iphone and the ipad and the apple watch i mean it's nice they spend a lot of time doing it is of a high standard but not particularly kind of my interest in terms of that kind of very abstract industrial design but these boxes are really nice so more impressed by the boxes than the phone i guess that's kind of a bit contrary um but what has been interesting is um so apple has this always had this kind of um kind of scenario that you don't need a a manual you kind of um have to you just kind of open up their product and it kind of kind of um kind of you find its own way so intuitive this is i've maybe i'm stupid and lots of people probably cheer at this point but um i definitely found that's not the case with the apple watch so the apple watch i've got like i've no idea what's going on with this i'm trying to obviously you're pairing it with your iphone to get it to work does it get do anything as soon as you buy one if you don't have an iphone it won't even tell the time it won't do anything at all um but to kind of you know even to do stuff like kind of changing watch faces and and certainly you know it is quite complex when you start to set up notifications and you want to switch some things off and so on and some

things on so i think there's that's kind of it that will be interesting that it's clearly at the current stage it is a early adopter kind of product even though potentially people think there might be 20 million sold this year um yes maybe more early adopters globally than they used to be but this is this is not a a kind of mass market product i think by any means it'll be so that's kind of interesting for apple because i think apple's products and it's success today has been kind of predicated on the fact that they do do they make technology simple and pretty much you know you kind of your metaphorical grandma or your two-year-old can use an apple product this is definitely not the case with the apple watch and i think that's that will be something interesting to watch haha um just to see kind of what the user case is any kind of something i kind of mentioned back with the pebble as well i think again with kind of watches you know as i say lots of watches and you you have them and use them in different kind of ways so i'm probably not a kind of um a typical example so but i think some people you know potentially will have watches for running and potentially you know you have a digital watch which is your

day-to-day and potentially have a more expensive analog watch which is your dress watch or one passed down to from the family and all this kind of stuff so i think the interesting other thing will be a more kind of um um what's the word um sociological maybe um approach to how people use watches which is they if people like watches they don't just have one watch people who wear watches normally have at least two watches and often lots of people have you know i i guess like me potentially have have you know a dozen watches or so um i will point out none of mine are expensive but as soon as you get the kind of the watch thing you start having uh there's this one and i get this one and i can wear that one for this kind of kind of reason i think it'd be interesting for the whether the apple watch kind of sits into that kind of portfolio approach that people have for watches which is not really i think what apple have designed it for apple has designed it to be worn every day um for at least 18 hours apart from when it's not charging um because it's kind of tracking a lot of this kind of health stuff and it's your notification alerts and and all this kind of malarkey um so more people spend um it's a considerable sum of money for a full watch that they

kind of wear less occasionally than all the time and obviously if people don't wear watches at all it's going to be a big ask for them to buy an apple watch and start wearing a watch all the time if they haven't really want to watch um to begin with because um you know there's still this kind of uh issue where if or if the watch does pan out to be something that tells the time is a bit of a state symbol and you can get notifications that then take you to your iphone is that gonna be enough for most people where you know most people looking at their phone how many hundred times a day anyway so this is that kind of scenario where they just kind of get a notification on their watch um gonna gonna be enough so we wait to see um just just to point out um there are when it comes to games i said there's a lot of these companion apps that don't think we're really going to work um there are lots of kind of tile-based learning games and and kind of brain training games and just kind of people trying their arm a little bit with the apple watches the device that may take off and interesting a lot those are paid there's two games that have kind of particularly kind of stand out at least at the moment um interestingly they both come from finnish developers so finland has also been leading the world for the last couple of years with rovio and

supercell lots of other companies but those are the two really big ones um so um seriously have had a game at called um best fiend best fiends um so you know kind of a second generation match three game and they've done quite a nice apple um kind of apple watch support um kind of uh addition to that game that game is all already out on iphone and android as well and also a new kind of startup which is some very very experienced guys in the finish industry and that's called everywhere games and they are just making games for wearable devices so the first game that comes pretty for the apple watch it's called roon blade and it's um i guess a a kind of based on i guess kind of text-based rpgs um it does have a iphone kind of companion app to it but the main point of it is is a apple watch game where you do kind of um short tasks on it and kind of play the game on the watch so we wait to see how those ones go those ones are both free with in-app purchases as part of the game system so we wait to see whether we get our first million dollar game

top grossing game from an apple watch and that'll be uh in the coming months maybe but i'll catch you next week you