Learning about Apple Watch’s Parts
Okay, you’re all geared up to test-drive all that Apple Watch can do, but if you’re using it for the first time, you may not even know all the parts of the watch and what they do.
Fair enough. In this section, you discover the basics of the hardware itself. I start with a look at the various parts of the watch on the outside and what they do.
Watch face
Regardless of which size you opted to go with — 41 mm or 45 mm (referring to vertical height) — the Apple Watch face is entirely digital, so you won’t find any buttons of any kind. Use your fingertip to move the icon bubbles, and tap an app to launch it. You can also tap, press, and swipe inside an app to perform a task.
Digital Crown button
Seasoned watch owners are familiar with the small rotary dial on a watch’s right side (left-handed people may flip the watch around so it’s on the left side), which is used to wind the watch (an old-school one, anyway) or set the time. Apple Watch has one too, called the Digital Crown shown in Figure 1-10. It's both a button and a dial, so it can be pressed, tapped, or turned forward or backward, with each change resulting in a different action. See Chapter 3 for more on what the Digital Crown button can do.
Side button
Along the side of the watch is a long button called the side button (how imaginative!), as shown in Figure 1-10 earlier in this chapter. From the Home screen and in any app, press this button to pull up your Dock (more on this later). Press and hold the side button to use SOS; double-click to use Apple Pay; or press and hold to turn your Apple Watch on or off.
FIGURE 1-10: If you wear Apple Watch on your left wrist, the side button is on the right side of the watch case. The Digital Crown button is the ridged dial.
Back sensors/charger
On the back of Apple Watch, as shown in Figure 1-11, are multiple sensors to monitor your heart rate, blood-oxygen level, and more. In fact, the addition of blood-oxygen monitoring beginning with Apple Watch Series 6 changed the back crystal underneath the watch; now it’s made up of four LED clusters and four photodiodes. See Chapter 2 for more on the sensors and the charger.
FIGURE 1-11: The sensors on the back of Apple Watch can, among other things, calculate your heart rate and measure your blood-oxygen percentage.
Watch band
Every wristwatch has a band to keep the screen snug on your wrist. You chose a specific band when you bought Apple Watch — a leather strap, a link bracelet, a classic buckle, a silicone band, and so on — but you can change bands later if you desire. Apple continuously introduces new bands, not to mention all the third-party ones available. It’s all about selection and customization.
Using Apple Watch’s Touchscreen
Just as you can interface with a smartphone, tablet, and laptop in different ways, based on the task at hand, Apple Watch gives you three ways to use the small screen on your wrist:
Tap: Tapping Apple Watch with one finger performs the same function that you’d expect on a smartphone: It selects whatever you’re tapping, such as an icon to launch an app, a song to play a track, a link to a website, a photo to enlarge, or virtual buttons, such as on a calculator. On the Home screen, you tap and slide your finger around to move the icon bubbles. A tap is like a left-click on a computer.
Press: Apple Watch knows the difference between a quick tap and a longer press, usually when you need to open some additional menus. Think of a press as a kind of right-click. Tapping a song plays the track, for example, but pressing and holding it opens a set of options: Shuffle, Repeat, Source, and AirPlay. The technology that senses the difference between a tap and a press is called Force Touch.
Swipe: Many areas of Apple Watch — including Dock — and most of the apps you can access let you swipe left and right or up and down to navigate among screens. In Workout mode, for example, you can see time elapsed and heart-rate info, but swipe to the side to pull up music that you can pause and play. Swipe one more time, and you’ll see more options, including the ability to lock your watch so you don’t accidentally tap the screen during rigorous exercise, pause your counter, and so on.Available only on the larger Apple Watch Series 7 is the option to pull up a small QWERTY keyboard (like a computer keyboard’s layout) to type words. The keyboard’s QuickPath feature also supports swiping from letter to letter to form words. Apple says that it uses machine learning to predict the word you’re typing. See Figure 1-12.
FIGURE 1-12: On Apple Watch Series 7, you can swipe between letters and let artificial intelligence predict your next words to speed your typing.
Understanding Apple Watch’s Wireless Functions and Internal Sensors
Oh, Apple Watch, you cleverly
