I’ll say it again, Apple could make this device so much easier to use one-handed if they just borrowed a little bit from the old Android Wear gestures that always worked so well for me (even on their comparatively junk hardware)… Flick the watch away/towards you with wrist twists to scroll up/down and highlight things, we could now use double-tap to select, and something like lift and lower forearm quickly to go back.

As it is currently though, assistive touch just isn’t great to use. You could always buy and try and return if it doesn’t work out.

Well… it’s helped me spontaneously skip 30 seconds ahead in my podcasts when I’m least expecting to.

I wish it could just be used to control notifications instead. If a notification comes in, just use double tap to dismiss and move on to the next notification (if there is one). If a notification came in a little while ago and I raise my wrist and it’s just showing the watch face, I’d like to double tap to pull down the notification shade to see the last notification.

Really though, I think it would be more convenient if Apple implemented wrist gestures, like Android Wear used to have. Double twist the wrist one way and it brings up the widgets, the other way brings up notifications - double twisting again in the same direction will scroll through whichever you’re looking at. Then the double tap feature could just be used for selection of a notification, wrist gestures could be used again to scroll through the notification and then to cycle between a few options like “dismiss”, “reply with voice”, “reply with text”, with double tap again functioning as select. Multiple notifications could be read, replied to or dismissed without having to use your other hand (or nose).

Would be a bit frustrating since I just jumped in on an s9 with steel link band and also grabbed a nomad leather band. Part of how I justified the cost of the link band especially was that I’ll be able to use it across multiple generations… so, here’s hoping it doesn’t change!

I also won’t be switching back, but it is pretty cool of them. Now, if only every interface change could be optional!

The first night I got my AW S9 I wanted to just shut it off, because it was charged up and I didn’t want to wear it for sleep tracking. So, at like 2:30AM I, half-asleep, tried figuring out how to shut it down for the first time.

I discovered that the shutdown process on AW is very similar to Wear OS watches - just going into Settings > General > Shut Down… The only problem is that, while on Wear OS there is a slider you have to swipe to confirm shutdown, but on AW that slider is instead for Emergency Call (and the power button is just a tiny on screen button you have to press). Well, I swiped out of habit before even reading.

I hit hang up the moment I saw that it triggered a call, thought that maybe I prevented it from going through, but then my phone started ringing literally like 2 seconds later. I knew ignoring the call would probably lead to EMS at my door, so I answered and just said “sorry, my mistake, new apple watch” and the nice lady on the other end already knew what I meant.