Well, after the previous blog post my phone dilemma was solved to the point where the snappiness of the 6s won me over despite the Nexus 5X being more versatile. I was thinking about what to do with my now-unused 6+, and I tried to sell it online for a while. However, secondhand market for the larger iPhones doesn't seem to be as active as the one for the smaller iPhones, and as a result of that I couldn't attract any buyers despite a reasonable price demand. Then I noticed a trade-in program with a Finnish retailer Gigantti. Of course the rate they offered wasn't quite the same than what I could get with selling the phone directly to a new owner, but still it was quite decent especially when considering that I'd get to keep all the accessories such as extra Lightning cables (you can't have enough of these lying around) and chargers, so it turned out to be an OK deal. However, part of the deal was that I'd spend the amount they'd pay for my 6+ on other products from the store, so I thought I'd finally get myself the Apple Watch. Sure, there are lots of (maybe clickbait?) articles popping up around the first anniversary of the Apple Watch, but despite all the gloom and doom in the articles, I'm rather happy with mine and so far it seems to beat the LG G Watch Android Wear device I used to wear, and it does so in almost every category. Currently the G Watch wins only in the "display the time constantly" department, as that's something which is not currently possible with the Apple Watch. However, I've noticed that the gesture for waking up the screen is rather reliable, more so than the G Watch equivalent that I used before just setting it up to display the time constantly.
I'm not going to do a category-by-category comparison for the simple fact that my Apple Watch gives my G Watch such a severe beating in too many ways that a more serious comparison wouldn't be even funny anymore. Let's just say that I'm happy with the more reliable activity tracking (no more bogus cycling credits for driving my car in a slow traffic), some quite useful glances and the possibility to respond to messages (using canned responses, though) and answer phone calls directly from my watch.
Sure, apps are slow to launch on the watch, but I use them so rarely that it doesn't really matter. I didn't use apps that much on my G Watch either. I mainly want to know what time is it (well duh, it's a watch), get my notifications and hopefully also deal with some of them straight away, and track my activity and hopefully motivate me to exercise a little bit more. The Apple Watch does these just fine and wins two out of three categories compared to Android Wear. In addition, even if the apps are quite slow to launch, having a slowly launching Authy on my wrist is still faster and more convenient than getting up and fetching my phone from another room when I need my two-factor authentication. However, getting up and walking to another room would fill my standing ring, so it's a win either way.
I also appreciate how easy it is to change the bands. However, I don't quite like the price of many Apple's bands, so maybe I'll give some 3rd party bands a try.
Now if only Apple Pay were available in Finland...
