New Apple Watch is a dive computer

[Degenerate]

Aerospace titanium and sapphire crystal.

That does sound pretty durable!

 

[Rick Brant]

I installed the app last night and bought a 1-month subscription just to check it out. So far I think it needs some work. I did a dive this morning and rather than going into SCUBA mode the watch went into Snorkeling mode. It stayed in that mode even though I was around 30' deep for about 90 minutes. I kind of wanted to see what the "out of the box" experience would be for a user, like someone who just got the 1-day pass for the app. Obviously this is not good as NDL was not shown. The app needs to just work when someone jumps in, in my opinion.

Another bug is that the compass locked up at one point for about 30 seconds. The compass is cool but very basic -- no way to set a course of any kind, no logging or anything really other than a bearing. After that pause it came back to life.

My dive did show up in the very basic logbook but there is something called "numbers of dive" and it has a value of 9, even though this was the first dive. The language makes me think the app was developed somewhere other than the US.

It's an OK start but there is nothing special about the app. It looks like programmatically they dropped a few text boxes on the screen and are just feeding in data from what was probably existing algorithm code. Not sure what I was expecting but something graphical would have been nice. I'm looking forward to other non-subscription options. I would do one myself (I'm an app developer) but I don't want the liability.

 

[Skunky]

the watch defaults to snorkel mode. settings, dive settings, dive mode. change from snorkel to dive.

so if i’m a free diver or snorkeler why would i want it to default to dive mode? smh.

smh

 

[Rick Brant]

the watch defaults to snorkel mode. settings, dive settings, dive mode. change from snorkel to dive.

so if i’m a free diver or snorkeler why would i want it to default to dive mode? smh.

smh

The info a snorkeler or free diver needs is already on the scuba screen. So if it defaults to scuba, everyone is happy & safe. Without NDL it is useless to scuba people. And does anyone really need a "snorkeling computer"? I mean what else is there besides depth.

This will be the first dive computer that requires the user to "enable dive computer" if a setting is needed.

 

[Eric802]

The info a snorkeler or free diver needs is already on the scuba screen. So if it defaults to scuba, everyone is happy & safe. Without NDL it is useless to scuba people. And does anyone really need a "snorkeling computer"? I mean what else is there besides depth.

This will be the first dive computer that requires the user to "enable dive computer" if a setting is needed.

And yet not the first watch to require the user to select a specific function in order to use that function.

 

[brsnow]

We are all used to Apple products basically thinking for you, I am guessing there is a bit of learning curve or set up with the app.

 

[Rick Brant]

Another interesting note. If you scuba dive in snorkel mode, like I did, you are locked out of using scuba mode for 24 hours. So if you are on dive one of your vacation boat dive, it won't work in dive one or dive two. Terrible design IMO. If user needs to select scuba vs snorkel it needs to be done during onboarding.

 

[ThatDogDontHunt]

The info a snorkeler or free diver needs is already on the scuba screen. So if it defaults to scuba, everyone is happy & safe. Without NDL it is useless to scuba people. And does anyone really need a "snorkeling computer"? I mean what else is there besides depth.

This will be the first dive computer that requires the user to "enable dive computer" if a setting is needed.

Seems like good feedback for the developers. Having it default to "not scuba" seems like a poor choice.

SB has lots of content about people not understanding their computer. Considering the target market for this device that many people are claiming is casual vacation divers, it would seem that they are being set up for failure.

 

[ThatDogDontHunt]

Another interesting note. If you scuba dive in snorkel mode, like I did, you are locked out of using scuba mode for 24 hours. So if you are on dive one of your vacation boat dive, it won't work in dive one or dive two. Terrible design IMO. If user needs to select scuba vs snorkel it needs to be done during onboarding.

View attachment 756025

Can you reset the watch?

 

[Ryebrye]

Another interesting note. If you scuba dive in snorkel mode, like I did, you are locked out of using scuba mode for 24 hours. So if you are on dive one of your vacation boat dive, it won't work in dive one or dive two. Terrible design IMO. If user needs to select scuba vs snorkel it needs to be done during onboarding.

View attachment 756025

That's actually kind of normal. Garmin and Shearwater both lock you out from diving if you do a dive in gauge mode - but on those computers you can reset it to let you dive anyway.