There aren’t many products that can be described as both flawed and masterful, but after a few weeks with the Apple Watch ($349 and up, way up), I think it fits the bill. The watch has many of the problems of a Release 1.0 device: The interface can be clunky, many features feel incomplete and the app ecosystem is a work in progress. Yet at the same time, this is an innovative device that has changed the way I use my smartphone for the better. I don’t want to go back.
The reason is simple: notifications. This is the Apple Watch’s bread-and-butter feature, and it is implemented amazingly well. When the watch was first announced, I couldn’t quite muster excitement for it, since most of the things you’d do with it—reading email and messages, checking maps, or tracking the speed and distance of your morning runs—couldn’t be done without carrying your phone along too. But upon using the watch, I realized that I had it all wrong. The watch was useful precisely because of the way it integrates with the phone.
