A review of Watching Without Looking A VoiceOver User's First Month with the Apple Watch by Anna Dresner

I was intrigued by the launch of the Apple Watch. I had tried a watch phone last year and was unable to do anything significant with it. The processor got into some kind of race condition, overheated and the device died. I also was unable to understand the use case for a watch that could only be paired with a phone. Watch phone still made more sense to me. Once the watch was released, I tracked it closely and was glad to see that accessibility features were in place. There was a fair amount of traffic on social media on what people were doing with their watches but I wanted something consolidated.
Disclosure: I have read Anna Dresner’s previous books and hers were the books I consulted when I first bought my iPhone five which I am still using. I was happy to learn that Anna had released a book on the Apple Watch. The first part of the book answered my question when it comes to use cases. I knew that the watch monitored activity and other health related parameters but I had no specific information. Her date -wise catalogue of adventures is well put together and is sufficiently detailed for the reader to follow along. I enjoyed the description of clock faces and yes, I would have also chosen the astronomy clock face if I had a watch. The description of the packing is handy because I have unbox several devices and have had to spend a few wetware cycles in figuring out what everything is.
The thing that stands out about this book is that Anna tells us what did not work as well as what worked. This is no Apple fanboy. She has chosen to format this as a journal and I was able to follow her journey from start to finish. A fantastic illustration of this is her adventures with the activity app. We still don’t know why it does not treat her walking as exercise. The use case for digital touch is not well defined but I was intrigued to learn how people have begun using it in terms of having specific codes to exit parties etc.
If I were to nitpick, the only downside of the book is that because it is in a journal format, it is not as well organised as a tutorial. Yes, I did learn about using the watch but some people would want to skip the errors along the way and get to the conclusion.
Overall, I am glad I bought the book even though I do not own an Apple Watch. I am in a position to evaluate whether I need the watch and what it will do for me. I am debating between a specific fitness gadget such as the Fitbit and the Apple Watch.