One rainy day 8 years ago, I was walking down the road with my umbrella when the rapid vibration of my Apple Watch alerted me to a phone call. I glanced at my watch and, after a 3-second battle of thoughts, decided to pull my phone out of my trouser pocket.
Is Apple Watch a phone-free device?
This was the proposition when the original Apple Watch was evaluated.
My conclusion over the past 8 years is that the Apple Watch is not a wrist iPhone, it can share the function of the phone in specific situations: check the time, watch the weather, receive WeChat notifications, and answer a call while exercising or using the toilet. The limitation of input capabilities makes it more like a receiver in terms of social attributes.
However, a familiar and unfamiliar gesture at the press conference caught my eye.
For the past week, I've been on a business, work, and life trip wearing this new Apple Watch Series 9. I was surprised to find that this watch, which was no different from its predecessor, had changed me as much as any previous generation.
▲ Apple Watch Series 9 new pink color scheme and Ultra 2, both equipped with the new S9 chip
One-handed back to WeChat is a killer function of "two fingers and two clicks"
Two-finger tap is an exclusive feature of this year's Apple Watch Series 9/Ultra 2, and you can use gestures to air manipulate the screen.
When you perform this gesture, there are small changes in blood flow to the wrist, and Apple uses accelerometers, gyroscopes, and heart rate sensors, combined with machine learning algorithms to recognize this small movement.
With watchOS 10.1 beta, I got this feature in advance, which may be slightly different from the official version in October.
Two fingers can only be activated when the screen is on. The moment two fingers are pointed together, the wrist receives a vibration feedback. At the same time, a gesture icon will appear at the top of the screen, and the control that was clicked by default will be highlighted. There is no delay, but if the gesture amplitude is too small, it is not easy to activate successfully.
After a week of experience, I think its biggest use is to reply to WeChat.
In the past, when using WeChat on my Apple Watch, my action was usually to click Reply directly in the notification and select a preset message.
If the presets don't meet your needs, you have three options:
Use a full keyboard on tight screens.
Practice calligraphy at your fingertips.
Or wait a few seconds to enter the WeChat app and use speech-to-text.
But if you have used one of these three methods, you will obediently return to your phone.
The reason is simple: On the surface, Apple Watch is strapped to one wrist, but the other hand is often not idle. But if you're holding a cup of coffee, holding an umbrella or holding a subway handrail, you can't do it.
On Series 9, the process has completely changed: the wrist receives a WeChat vibration notification, raises the wrist, double-finger mutual tap twice to activate voice recognition, dictate, and send messages with two fingers again, all in one go.
Free your right hand and don't need to bother your phone.
iOS 17 greatly improves the accuracy of speech recognition, and in a few days of use, its Chinese recognition is quite reliable, and it also supports mixed Chinese-English conversion.
The entire interaction process is completed in the notification system and does not need to enter the WeChat app. However, if the other party sends a message repeatedly, the Apple Watch can only display the latest one, and you have to go back to the phone to understand the context.
When I walk through the airport with my suitcase, I can communicate with my colleagues just by lifting my wrist and fingers and moving my mouth every now and then. When my phone was left in the locker while running at the gym, my family called, and I didn't have to rummage through my bag to find my phone.
The Apple Watch Series 9 is like a screen on your wrist that only alerts you when you need it, and your fingers and voice are the remote control.
As a professional who lives in to-dos and WeChat notifications every day, WeChat is the first app I open most frequently after unlocking my phone, and it has topped the list of "screen time" on my phone without suspense.
I often reflect on myself: How much time is really spent on valuable communication? A few simple words to echo, and how many times do you need to unlock your phone frequently?
This week of wearing the Apple Watch Series 9, the watch soothed my WeChat anxiety, and I also tried to change the habit of never leaving the phone, and with it, the iPhone battery life became longer. There is even feedback from friends that my reply to WeChat has become faster.
For photographers, travelers and other people who don't often work in front of the computer, the Apple Watch Series 9/Ultra 2 may be able to save you from many moments of confusion.
So, is it a great interaction to point twice between fingers?
Apple has a strong insight into interaction design: keyboard and mouse-driven GUI, two-finger zoom brought by multi-touch, Taptic Engine brings gear-like delicate vibration to digital crowns, Pinch and Hold in Vision Pro... Even illiterate children can easily get started.
The point is that these operations are simple and intuitive, dragging, scrolling, pinching... One-to-one mapping to real-world experience makes interactions logical. The interaction logic remains consistent even across apps and scenarios. For example, in any secondary interface, swiping right on the edge of the screen represents a return.
Double Tap's gesture naming also exists in Vision Pro interactions, equivalent to opening apps and controls. But in Apple Watch, the object of the two-finger two-point operation is not directivity - you don't know when you can point with each other, and you don't know what the two-finger point can bring.
This uncertainty can cause some confusion for beginners, and Apple has apparently considered this, and if the gesture doesn't work, the screen will have the effect of the gesture shaking left and right, as if shaking your head to signal: this will not work.
Through many attempts, I summarized the scenarios, notifications, and applications currently supported by Two-finger Point.
In the notification scenario, two fingers are equivalent to the Execute Default Action button. For example, when receiving an SMS notification, two fingers are equivalent to pressing the reply button.
In the same way, when the alarm goes off, two fingers are clicked twice to skip the alarm by default, which is very insightful to human nature, but I hope Apple provides one more choice.
In the incoming call notification, the two-finger mutual point corresponds to the answer, and the two-finger mutual point is hung up. I also hope that Apple will change the settings to hang up the harassing call on the watch, which I believe is a more frequent scene than answering.
Under the main screen of raising the wrist, two fingers are exchanged twice to scroll and intelligently stack them to display the important widget information at the moment. However, I customized it in the settings to turn on the first widget "Now Playing" to achieve the effect of air control music.
In-app gesture manipulation currently only supports a few out-of-the-box apps:
Music: tentative/playing, or switch to the next track.
Timer: tentative/resumed, ended
Stopwatch: Stop/Resume. Due to the delay, this feature is of little use.
Podcasts/Audiobooks: Play/Pause
Compass: Switch to an altitude scale
Flashlight: Switch between three brightness modes
Camera remote control: With your phone's camera app, you only need to move your fingertips when controlling the shutter.
To sum up, compared with in-app gestures, instant gesture feedback for notifications is more practical, especially in high-frequency application scenarios such as phone calls and WeChat. The former is just the icing on the cake, the latter is the best in the snow.
I'm also looking forward to developers optimizing app notifications for Apple Watch, adapting two-finger gestures to two clicks, and currently think of two scenarios:
- Make WeChat and Alipay into smart stacking, so that users do not need to take out their mobile phones and call up the payment QR code with one hand.
- When the taxi app arrives at the pick-up point, the user can directly gesture to reply to the preset content, such as: I will arrive soon, the driver master please wait.
Niche features derived from accessibility ultimately benefit you and me
As early as watchOS 8, Apple introduced the accessibility features of Assistive Touch, which opened the door for people with disabilities to control Apple Watch. This feature evolved into Assistive Touch with Quick Actions in watchOS 9. Since then, gesture operations such as mutual points and pinching have become more and more perfect.
Without these technological explorations for minority groups, there would be no "two fingers and two clicks" this year.
In the past, whenever people heard "barrier-free", they would instinctively think of people with disabilities and feel that they did not care about themselves. But there are often moments of helplessness in life, and we are always enjoying the convenience of "barrier-free":
When you are driving, looking ahead, it is not safe to frequently look at the phone navigation, and receiving navigation information by listening is a more barrier-free interaction. And when you're walking on the road, voice is also a safer way than keyboard input.
We all have a day when we get older, we all have a day when our vision is deteriorating, we can all become a so-called minority, pushing ourselves and others, accessibility is not an exclusive label for people with disabilities, and the improvement and simplification of technology is not the icing on the cake.
In my opinion, two fingers are like art at the fingertips, which allows tens of millions of users to enjoy barrier-free convenience in a way that is four or two pounds.
▲With the help of the second generation of ultra-wideband technology chips, the watch can display the distance and orientation when looking for the mobile phone
After WWDC in June this year, I had the opportunity to talk to Kevin Lynch, the technical lead of Apple Watch software, and I tried to pry a little clue about the new Apple Watch from his mouth, and asked him what is the direction and principle of Apple Watch iteration?
Kevin pondered, saying that he often tortured himself with three questions. One of the questions is:
How can we help connect more easily with others?
Eight years later, on the same rainy day, the same rapid vibration on my wrist, I suddenly remembered Kevin's words, and then instinctively, raised my fingertips.