Not quite hands-on with the Apple Watch, and the questions it doesn’t answer

CUPERTINO, CA—It would be exaggerating to say we got “hands-on” time with the Apple Watch that the company announced this morning. Apple had several tables sprinkled throughout its hands-on booth (the large white building you may have seen in pictures), and you could try on some watches at those tables. But those watches were in a non-interactive demo mode, and the only opportunity we got to see the watches actually working were in carefully guided mini-presentations given by the people at the tables.

Those little song-and-dance routines ran us through the same kinds of things that Tim Cook talked about on stage when he introduced the Apple Watch earlier today—using the “digital crown” to scroll and zoom, drawing and tapping out small messages to people in your contacts list, and a surface-level glance at some of the fitness information. We saw what it looks like to change watch faces and to customize them. We experienced the "taptic" vibration the watch uses to let you know it wants something, and it was indeed as subtle as Cook said it was. We just didn’t get to actually take the watch's software for a spin, something that’s kind of integral for an accessory that you’re meant to have with you all the time.

The one thing we did manage to get a better sense for was the sheer variety of different Apple Watches. The watch itself comes in the standard stainless steel Apple Watch body, the aluminum body of the Apple Watch Sport, and the 18 karat gold body of the Apple Watch Edition (three options). Each of those types of watches comes in either 38mm high or 42mm high models (six options). Each watch also comes with two different color options (12 options). Each can be paired with one of six different band styles (72 options). Each band comes in a variety of different colors.

You get the picture—just as iPhones come in different colors and can be put into different cases, the Apple Watch can be personalized pretty much however you like it. An Apple representative also indicated that the final retail version would take left-handed folks into consideration, though it’s not clear whether this would be done in hardware or software.

This is one area where Apple is already ahead of every Android Wear watch we’ve seen so far: watches are a fashion accessory as well as a functional piece of hardware, and not everyone has the same taste. Though all of the watch faces are broadly similar, and they all do the same thing, the watches themselves can be customized to account for different tastes or even for different activities (if you run in the morning and go out to fancy dinner parties at night, for instance). Other watches come with one face and interchangeable bands, allowing for a limited amount of customization that doesn’t actually extend to the core of the watch itself.

We got a chance to use the Apple Watch and the Apple Watch Sport, one with the Sport Band and one with the Link Bracelet (this page has all of these names on it, if you’re having trouble keeping track). The Sport Band felt like the kind of thing you’d want with a fitness gadget—you’re going to be sweating all over it, so you don’t want something fragile or overly heavy. The Link Bracelet felt more like the band you’d use if you intended to wear this thing in place of a typical watch, and one of the people manning the demo table walked us through removing and re-adding links based on the size of your wrist. Both bands felt pretty solid, and the watches felt nice on our wrists, but the 10 minutes or so of time we could actually wear the watch doesn’t give you a very good idea of how they’ll feel in the long term.

The one thing you won’t be able to customize away is the watch’s square screen, a shape reviewers and commenters have generally been pretty negative on in early Gear and Android Wear devices. Most of the buzz in the wearable world seems to focus on round-screened watches like the Moto 360 or the LG G Watch R. This, like so much else about smartwatches, is a matter of taste, and it’s important to remember that people who talk about smartwatches on the Internet ultimately represent just a tiny subsection of the buying public.

The real takeaway from our time with the iWatch is that it’s impossible to get a good idea of how you’d actually use this thing based on wearing a non-interactive version for a handful of minutes. Wearable devices are meant to be with you all the time, and you need to actually wear one all the time for at least a few days to know how it’ll fit into your digital life.

The things we really need to know about the Apple Watch are things we can’t know until it’s actually out: what does it do, and how does it work? The Apple Watch looks like a more credible fitness gadget than any Android Wear (or Samsung Gear) smartwatch we’ve seen yet. Tim Cook hinted at some additional capabilities—controlling his Apple TV, using the watches as walkie-talkies—beyond the simple notifications-on-your-wrist thing that the presentation focused much of its attention on. The addition of the crown makes navigation a little more interesting, though a lot of the interactions seem to require the same swiping and tapping that Android Wear devices require. But until we see it in real life, we don’t know how any of that stuff will actually play out.

And, finally, one last question: what’s the battery life like? Reports that its battery life is unspectacular have already begun to circulate, and the fact that it went unmentioned in Apple’s presentation probably isn’t a great sign. Yes, it’s non-final hardware, but if it was something Apple was particularly proud of you can bet we would have heard about it.

We’d expect the Apple Watch to gain traction by virtue of being an Apple product. The company’s brand is strong enough and its reach is wide enough that a fair number of people will pick one up regardless of what it does. The real question is what they’ll be able to do with it—the answer will decide whether the Apple Watch will succeed on the scale of the iPhone or iPad, or the much smaller, much quieter scale of the Apple TV.