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Apple watch – review after a year

Posted on by Saru

I got the Apple Watch last year and I have been using it for every day ever since and I love it. Below is a brief review after using the watch for over an year.

tl:dr I love it and it is totally the best smart watch you can get.  (You may want to wait a few months as apple watch 2 might launch in Oct 2016)

Pros:

  • Works great as fitness tracker. It has tracking for most common workout needs you may have.
  • Notifications on the watch have been a huge time saver. Huge time saver while driving or in meetings. Some times you can take a step forward and acknowledge messsages (A quick reply is just a tap away).
  • A plethora of apps have evolved. They help  with tracking productivity and reminders etc
  • Siri works well.
  • Bling aspect is still true as was when it launched.
  • Watch faces and the interchangeable bands help suit the mood/trend/fashion.

Cons:

  • Was too slow. (Not any more, watchOS 3 fixes it and the speed increase is phenomenal).
  • Battery life wasn’t  great. I8 hours wasn’t great in comparison to the fitbits and Garmins that last for a week. Not much of a deal breaker for me.
  • Sleep tracking isn’t part of the watch at all. The pillow app fixes this. I wish the watch had native tracking like the Fitbits do.

Watch OS 3:  It is a phenomal update that would be coming to the watch soon. I am testing it on my watch, it isn’t stable yet, but it opens up the watch in a multitude of ways and adressess most of the complaints and restrictiveness it had.

You may think, I am just an apple fan boy and hence my fanatcism with it. Actually I have tested the Fitbit Surge (still own one),  Fitbit  Flex  and  a Garmin Vivofit as my daily activity trackers/ smart watches. So far, the most satisfying experience has been from the Apple watch and hence my recommendation above.

iOS -Keyboards

Posted on by Saru

Note:-

Quick update, the post is 6 years old and we are on iOS 13.0 and the builtin apple keyboard on iOS comes with Swype now, so all of these keyboards reviewed below are rendered unnecessary unless you are going to use them for a different function besides just Swype functionality.

iOS has come a long way since the version 1.0, in fact it has been 8 years since the OS was first launched. To be truly judgemental, version 8 has seen the most exciting features ever since the launch of App store. Since this is a very detailed post on iOS 8 Keyboard Extensions and there are quite a lot of features that shipped with iOS 8, its better you check out the full list of features elsewhere here.

Extensions across iOS has been the most talked about feature of this release, and I have been looking forward to third party keyboard extensions ever since I saw the swipe keyboards on Android. iOS 8 brings keyboard extensions to all iOS 8 supported devices which are iPhone 4S and later models, iPod 5th Generation, iPad 2nd Genartation and later and iPad Mini all versions. Here is how some popular third party keyboards work and how they fare so far in real life. But before that some Continue reading “iOS -Keyboards”