The 1st Generation Apple Watch was not the game changer people had hoped for. It wasn't really good for anything other than standard pedometer and HR functions. It required to always have your iPhone with you and was just not very diverse. However, with Apple Watch 2 and the updated Apple Watch, this has changed everything; specifically because of the Apple Watch 2. I will be focusing on the Apple Watch 2, going into a little detail on the watch, and then going over the ecosystem.Fitness Watch or Smart Watch?
It's both. I won't sugar coat this though; it's one of the best smart watches, but still lacks greatly in the fitness watch department. However, the Apple Watch 2, in my opinion, is superior to most non-hardcore sports watches. So, if you are a triathlete or long distance runner like me, then Garmin, TomTom, Polar and Suunto are your choices. Yes, you can use others, but they just don't have the accuracy, sports tracking metrics and functions, and battery life that the 4 mentioned do.
Anyway, Apple Watch 2 is my focus here because I got to use one for about 5 months. As a note, I am going to be selling it because, although I love the smart watch features more than I can really properly describe, it doesn't even partially meet my sports training needs. Maybe in the near future some third party software company will figure out how to tap Watch OS to get more data, and Apple will improve battery life. Until then, I'll be sticking with my generic smart alerts on my Garmin 920xt.
About the Watch - From a fitness standpoint
So, the Apple Watch 2 has GPS and is waterproof. This makes the watch a fully functioning multi-sport watch. It still has wrist HR, thankfully improved from the first generation. You will need to charge your watch daily with a standard workout regiment. However, I found myself having to charge 2-3 times a day when I was doing multiple workouts, where both were using GPS and longer than 1 hour each. However, this was me being cautious; you can get away with only 1-2 charges. As a point of reference for readers, standard use for me was utilization of many apps throughout the day, as well as at least 1 workout, non-GPS, of 60 to 90 minutes. I would still have close to 20% battery life before I went to bed.
From a GPS standpoint, I found that once it picked up the signal, it was almost spot on for distances in outdoor swimming, outdoor running, and outdoor cycling. However, the map detail is severely lacking and you CAN NOT export to another service to see more detail. Thankfully it was close enough to my Garmin 920xt that I felt somewhat comfortable with the accuracy. You can use third party apps to get more detail, but they can only get so much data because Apple restricts a lot of the data available to other apps.
From a non-GPS standpoint, I found the watch to still be pretty good. It did not handle rapid variations in HR very well, but for stead-state workouts, it was almost identical. For treadmill running, I was pleasantly surprised how accurate the watch was for distance. It was never more than .2 miles under what the treadmill mileage would read, and never more than .1 miles under what my Garmin watch would read. However, if I did intervals with constantly varying paces, it became like most other watches; inaccurate. I did not play around with 3rd party apps much, so I didn't see if I could sync up a foot pod...maybe you can do this, I don't know. You can sync up a BT HR monitor though, which exponentially increases the battery life of the watch. I had a 2 hour trainer ride where my battery hardly drained on my watch while using HRM, versus a 45 min trainer ride without HRM. So this might be a good workaround if you are going to have really long workouts or workout days.
Apple Activity and Apple Health
Apple has two application for you to review you data; Apple Activity and Apple Health. Apple Activity is the software on your watch that tracks everything. It then sends the details to your phone so you can see more stats, maps if you did GPS, etc. It's a great design and extremely easy to see your data. There is virtually no learning curve on this. On the flip-side, there is too little data for the more data-centric athlete.
Apple Health lives exclusively on iOS. It basically is a repository of any health data that you can sync with it. So, anything from your watch ends up here. You can see trends in regards to HR, sleep (need 3rd part app or 3rd party accessories for sleep tracking), or any other stat you get into this app. It's not the most intuitive app, but has amazing customization, which I find great because I can really tailor it to what I want to see and what I really care about.
As I said though, Apple Health lives exclusively on iOS. To make this more difficult, Apple Activity has the same issue. Therefore, you can look at Apple's ecosystem as a closed loop, with no online portal. However, there are increasingly more apps which can pull data from Apple Health to display on their sites, such as MyFitness Pal. It's still not ideal though, but a choice made for security reasons by Apple. Right or wrong, that's how it is.
3rd Party Apps
As I have eluded to, there are lots of 3rd party apps that utilize more functionality and data capturing of the Apple Watch. Again though, they can only get what Apple makes accessible. There are still lots of 3rd party apps not using the GPS function of the watch very well either. Although Runkeeper uses it, the GPS seems to have more issues than using the native app or the Nike+ app. I am sure companies will get better with supporting ALL of the functionality on the Apple Watch 2. The beauty of Apple's ecosystem is that it can grow exponentially thanks to 3rd party app and hardware vendors. In addition, there are rumors that the next iteration of the Apple Watch will have a much better battery; but we shall see.
Final Thoughts
If you are primarily into general fitness, do some races - short or long, or like multiple sports and don't need long duration tracking, then the Apple Watch 2 has you covered. In addition, it's one of the best Smart Watches I have ever used. Android watches still have a ways to go, even though the Polar one is pretty nice. If you need a long battery life though, more accuracy, and more data, you will want to have a dedicated fitness watch for that part. And since Apple's ecosystem is mostly closed off, you will have to manually sync, if possible, to get the whole picture of your workouts. If I was just starting out in triathlon, and never had been spoiled with my Garmin, I would probably find the Apple Watch to be a perfect training partner. The final ecosystem, TomTom, is up next!
