New iPhones? Meh. Basically what you could get elsewhere a year ago. NFC payment? Google pushed on this a while ago but it seems we have Apple to thank for getting more vendors on board. Hopefully it will work with Android phones as well. New watches? Good on them for having multiple sizes and style options, but boo for the non-standard strap attachment, so you can't just buy any third-party strap. (No doubt they've patented the strap connector so third-party strap makers have to pay to play.) Google's going to need to ramp up the style points on the built-in watch faces for Android Wear, but otherwise Wear seems to be a much more useful watch.

The price is $349. I don't know, but I'm guessing that'll be too much for most people. Ok, so you can do some fun stuff with it, but only if it's linked to an iPhone. And then I don't see any benefit. If you've got an iPhone in your pocket, you might as well use that. The AppleWatch seems mostly like an expensive remote for the iPhone to me.

For those who are excited about smart watches, Apple seems to have done a good job with it. Those who were interested in the Pebble, for example, will probably find it quite compelling.

I'm not one of those people. I've been really enjoying having my expensive pocket watch instead of something on my wrist bugging me all the time. I haven't worn a watch since getting a cellular phone, and I'm not planning to change that.

Agreed about the nonstandard strap connection though. I worked in retail jewelry for several years, and if there's one thing I know, it's that people always have and always will want a wide variety of watch straps available. The watches which had proprietary strap connectors (they were in the minority, but still common) were always a hassle.

Of course, I said the same thing about dashboard DIN slots...

Yes, I'd like to know exactly what you can and cannot do if the iPhone is not around. Unless I missed it.

I don't mind the Watch. it seems the best smart watch design so far (pending the answer to my previous question). And, as far as I am concerned, very good that they made a phablet.

The protruding lens is horrible, IMO.

I'm curious about the NFC integration. Will they be using it more more than just Apple Payments? As a non iPhone user I'm hoping the entry of the iOS juggernaut pushes the adoption of NFC payments.

As far as the camera goes, I'm wondering if they were going to include that bump why not take advantage and up the specs of the chip, 8MP is OK but on the flagship device you'd think they could have improved on that.

As far as the watch it looks nice, waiting to see the battery specs. Again, as a non iPhone user it's ultimately irrelevant to me. But it's nice to see some new entries into the wearables market.

Pricing: a typical "Fossil" watch seems to clock in around $100. A Rolex Submariner of dubious provenance costs $7000. There's a lot of room in there for fancy electronic watches if they're really good.

Certainly, the Android Wear watches are all much less. The nicest one so far, the Moto 360, is $249 and sold out in minutes. A Pebble is $149 (plastic) or $249 (steel). If/when things settle down, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see one of these vendors selling "Wear movements" that other vendors put in their own cases. $2000 for a watch? There's plenty of market for it.

NFC payments have been around here (Canada) for a while now, for Android and even Apple devices. Are they not that common in the states?

Carrying a phone around with me allowed me to stop wearing a watch. I'll wear a watch again when the phone is in it, not in my pocket.

NFC payment in the U.S. is pretty rare. It's at my CVS drug store but otherwise, I don't often see it. My understanding is that all the NFC standards have done, to date, is just ship your existing credit card over, in the clear. Very disappointing. Apple hasn't announced any details, but based on what they said at the keynote, they appear to be creating one-time card numbers, for any given transaction, and feeding those over NFC. Depending on how it's done, that would be a significant security improvement over the dumb thing that happens when you have an NFC-enabled plastic credit card.

Well, MY smart watch cost less than $15. What's all the excitement about?

tanstaafl.

As a present for my first day at primary school, my Grandfather gave me a digital watch, relatively inexpensive for those days (early 80s), of some minor brand.

I loved it, as anyting with LCD looked so futuristic to me.

Then I saw that wrist watch you have, Doug, on some magazine, and THAT has been a dream for me, until my parents agreed to get me a Casio Data Bank, years later.

So, that is a dream watch to me, to this day. Well, it's first version from the early 80s.

This is it, my first smart watch.

http://image.rakuten.co.jp/onemore/cabinet/casio/db-310a-1z-a.jpg

God!, I feel old.

-jk

I'm sure Dick Tracy is older than you.

Like wise, I've not worn a watch since work gave me a pager back in 2000 or so. How long until the watch is the phone? I've no idea where the mic and speaker would go, I for one would not want to wear and ear piece all the time, and holding the watch up to my ear would be tiresome. May the iCochlear?

All this talk of digital watches reminds me of Douglas Adams:

When the iPhone was first announced and then released, many misunderstood what it really was in part because it was called a 'phone'. It was in fact primarily a mobile Internet connected computer. The phone aspect was merely a familiar function. Almost all the interesting stuff had little to do with making phone calls.

The Apple Watch seems to be following a similar arc. It is not a 'watch', it is a very mobile Internet connected computer. A sensor laden device to boot. Most of the interesting stuff will not have much to do with telling time.

Looking forward a few years and hardware/software upgrade cycles, it seems likely that the Apple Watch will get slimmer, better, and more capable. Feels like the iPhone original launch, but already way more polished. Should be interesting to see where Apple and the developer community can take this.

Wow, memory lane. I had one of those too. Now, looking at it, I forget how on earth you entered data into the thing. Did you have to scroll through numbers and letters one character at a time? Wow, how did we tolerate that?

Of course, even earlier I'd had more than one of the Casio calculator watches like Doug showed, too. The little rubberized buttons never lasted quite long enough.

Later I had one of the Timex Datalink jobbies that would read bar codes off your CRT. That was pretty darn amazing to me. Loved that thing. Then I got a cell phone, and a data cable for the cell phone, and software to manage my contact list on the phone, and that was the last time I ever wore a watch.

Now my phone synchs with my Google contacts wirelessly and automatically. Wow.

In general, I've found that the US banking/payments industry (at least where consumers are concerned) is about a decade behind anywhere else.

I recall ATMs being ubiquitous at banks in Canada (even in small towns), while over in the US, having an ATM at a bank merited a billboard (at least, that's what I saw it Detroit & suburbs). And over 3-5 years, those billboards gradually changed from "we have an ATM" to "we have an ATM open 24hrs." It took a few more years after that for the billboards to disappear altogether.

I think it stems from having a largely unregulated mess of competing companies, who've all created their own standards, with little regard to interoperability.

I like:

- the design
- the sapphire glass (I know I'm going to knock a watch against stuff all the time)

I don't like:

- the price
- that they didn't call it the iWatch

Isn't it bad branding to call your device such a generic term? Are they assuming that everyone will call it the "Apple Watch" every time? Or will everyone just assume from this day forth that when you're talking about a watch, you're talking about a Watch?

Also, I'm happy to see mobile payments take off, but as usual, I'm the guy who hates proprietary "standards." I don't mind having multiple players in the mobile payments game, but unless users can have the expectation that their form of payment will be accepted at every location, then we're never going to lose credit cards as the standard, which makes less of a motivation for business owners to accept any mobile payments.

Ah, yes, the stable always-works system of cre...

After the whole fiasco with Target and Home Depot, the retail side of the credit card industry is evolving rapidly. Apple appears to be supporting standard NFC credit card presentation (as Google has done for years), which is supported by many vendors, including CVS and Home Depot.

OK, then I'm fine with it. As long as whatever payment system is put in place is platform agnostic, I'll be happy.

What I'm not fine with is Apple deciding to force U2's new album on every iTunes and iOS user. I now have clients contacting me because they're worried that someone hacked their account or something. One of them only has an iPad, and it's apparently difficult to remove the content from within iOS.

I wasn't aware of the U2 thing, yep, it's on my phone. Creepy.

I wouldn't use Apple payments because I don't trust Apple. The credit card I have on file with them (to buy apps & such) is a pre-paid thing with a $100 limit. I'd never give them access to my real cards.

The U2 thing does seem to be a misstep for Apple, not sure how that made it through their internal 'appropriateness' vetting process.

Across the spectrum of large tech companies, Apple ranks near the top in trustworthiness from my perspective. Glitches and screw ups happen with all of the players but Apple seems to hew closest to 'doing the right' thing fairly consistently.

I highly distrust the companies that depend upon advertising and privacy manipulation for their core revenue. Doing the right thing often seems orthogonal to their business model.

I had to buy a new watch last year as mine wouldn't have been repaired in time for a trip. I was semi-worried because one of the points that most reviews made was the lack of sapphire glass (you can send it in to get the sapphire glass installed, but it takes a while and is an extra expense).

Even without it, I bang my watch into stuff all the time and it still doesn't have a single scratch on it. Overall, I'm happy with this regular glass so far. Although, it is nice to have the option to send it in for the sapphire once I do manage to scratch the current glass.

What watch are you referring to?

Citizen Skyhawk AT.

Pretty much mirrors my thoughts. I wore the Pebble around for a bit, and saw the promise of some of what a wrist device could do. I see a lot of the first attempts at smart watches the same way I saw the first attempts at smart phones. It's amazing to me how quickly these things evolve now though. It took a good decade of various smart phone attempts before the modern approach took over. Watches seem to be changing much quicker.

It was clear from the Pebble that for anything to really succeed, it would need deeper integration. The Apple Watch will do just that coming from the same company as the phone. Similar to how the best of the Samsung watch only comes out when paired with a Samsung phone. The downside is more ecosystem lock-in, but the upsides could be pretty handy.

I'm personally interested in the fitness aspect. I've had an iOS 8 beta already loaded on my phone, and it was keeping track of some stuff due to the M7. The watch would help provide a deeper view into my daily activities.

Both the watch and payment systems show the more conservative side of Apple, but also their long view on some aspects. I appreciate them seeding the hardware needed to talk to the watch in their phones since 2011. The payment side will have to wait for me though, as I'm holding out for the iPhone 6s. The needed NFC bit is new to the iPhone 6, past methods that worked with an iPhone required a phone case with the right hardware. For a time it seemed Apple wasn't interested in NFC at all, and had hoped to push this via Bluetooth iBeacons. Apple Pay does apparently work across Bluetooth too, but I don't expect wide adoption there.

While all this was being announced, my 5s was in a form fitting mount leading me through some great costal areas on the motorcycle. The tick/tock cycle with the design makes more sense for me to wait to get a better accessory selection. I'm disappointed that the iPhone 6 Plus has a camera feature the iPhone 6 lacks. And I'm still on the fence about the size. I appreciate them offering options now to those who want larger phones, but I hope to keep a pocketable for me form factor around. I'll have to hold the 4.7 inch device before my opinion is fully formed there.