Friday, December 25, 2015

Santa brought you an Apple Watch? Here’s what to do first

Apple Watch launches

If you were lucky enough to receive an Apple Watch as a present this year, you'll no doubt be keen to see what it offers, and what you can do with it.

To start you'll need to pair it with an iPhone 5 or later, running iOS 9 or later. This is straightforward enough, go to Settings > Bluetooth on your phone and make sure the feature is enabled. Press and hold the side button (next to the digital crown) on your Watch to turn it on, and once you've selected a language, tap Start Pairing on your watch, and on your iPhone.

An animation will play on your Watch. Hold your phone over this, centering the Watch in the camera's viewfinder, until you see a message stating the Watch is paired. You can always pair it manually if things don't work out or you don't see the pairing animation.

On the iPhone, tap Set Up as New Apple Watch and choose which wrist you plan to wear the Watch on. Tap Agree when faced with the terms and conditions.

Sign in to your Apple account and the review the settings. Services like Siri and Location will be synced between devices.

You can set a passcode for the Apple Watch (the device automatically locks when you take it off your wrist), and then sync your iPhone apps to the Watch. Not all of the apps you have on your iPhone will be added to the watch, only the compatible ones. When you browse and buy new apps on your iPhone you'll be able to see if there's a Watch app included as well. The Featured section in the Watch app (on your phone) contains a good selection of apps to get you started.

You can install all apps or just sync Mail, Contacts and Messages, and choose which apps to install later on. Removing any apps you don't want or use is easy enough and done through the Watch app on your phone.

There's a good chance you'll receive too many notifications on your Watch, and it will be pinging and tapping you on the wrist repeatedly, so you'll want to adjust this which, like most things, you can do through the iPhone app. Go to Notifications section.

Once that's finished, you're ready to start using the Watch. If there's an update for WatchOS available, you'll want to install that, which (again) you can do through the Watch app on your iPhone.

Learn your way around

Once you're up and running you can spend time getting to know Watch and learn what's possible with it.

To wake the watch, just angle the screen towards you. If you don't want to move your wrist to see what's on screen, you can set it so a tap will wake things up.

The Watch's digital crown acts as a home button, and is also used for scrolling and summoning Siri. To change the default watch face press down on the existing design, and you can choose an alternative from the selection that pops up.

You can choose which apps to have as glances (the information you require is shown "at a glance"), and these can be accessed by swiping up from the watch face screen. The first glance screen shows you that Watch is connected, and lets you toggle airplane mode, do not disturb or silent modes on or off, and also ping your iPhone-- handy if you've misplaced it.

Scrolling from right to left takes you to the activity monitor (which shows Move, Exercise and Stand progress), music player (control the music on your phone), heart rate monitor, battery remaining indicator (you can switch to power reserve here if the juice is too low), the calendar, stocks, maps, world clock, weather and any other glance-friendly apps you've installed.

A lot of things you can do with the watch can be controlled through Siri. You can use her to start a song playing on your phone, for example. While Siri can be summoned by pressing the crown, the hands free approach of just saying "Hey Siri" at the Watch works very well.

The Camera app acts as a remote snapper for taking photos with your phone, and there's a 3 second delay option to avoid you having lots of shots with your wrist in front of your face. Photos lets you view images on your watch.

If you intend you use Watch with Apple Pay, set it up through the iPhone app and then double-click the side button on the watch to call up the credit card you added, ready to use with an Apple Pay reader.

Apple Watch is a great device, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of enjoyment from it.


Source: Santa brought you an Apple Watch? Here's what to do first

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