It’s a pain in the ass to pull a phone out of your pocket when you’re sitting down -especially in jeans.

I pull my phone out of my pocket 30 times/day just to interact with it for 5 seconds: when I get into my car and the kids want to listen to the Disney Pandora station; when I get a phone call to see who it’s from; when I need to see where my next meeting is; when I need to perform two-factor authentication to login; etc.

This is the first world problem that I was hoping the Apple Watch would solve.  My Apple Watch arrived last night and I’ve now had it for 24 hrs, and so far I’m happy.

Pros:

• The Modular watch face comes configured to show the current or next item from your calendar.  It displays the meeting title, time and location.  My work week is 80% scheduled these days – so I’m frequently trying to figure out where I should be going next.  Having this available as a flick of the wrist is super handy.
• Two factor auth works!  Duo Mobile works flawlessly.  I can login to my work VPN by providing my password and asking it to push the request to my watch.  The authentication notification comes to my watch and I can just press approve.  I don’t have to take my hands away from the keyboard.  For services that don’t support push – like GMail – the Duo Mobile watch app can generate passcodes with a few presses (open app, select the account).  This takes away some of the friction from two-factor auth.
• Starting up a Pandora radio station works.  After buckling up, while my phone (in my pocket) is establishing the bluetooth connection to the car radio, I can open the Pandora app and click the “Do You Want to Build a Snowman” station, so my daughters and I can play name-that-tune and sing along on the ride to school.

Cons:

• There’s a whole bunch of apps installed on the watch that I’ll never use and I cannot delete – e.g. stocks, weather.  They’re just taking up space and making it harder to find the few apps I want to use.
• By default the Activity app is everywhere: in the glances, sending you updates every couple of hours, sending reminders to stand up, etc.  I had to go into the settings and turn off 6 different notifications to get it to shut up.  And I still can’t remove the app from my watch app screen.
• By default all app notifications start out enabled on the Apple Watch.  And to make it even worse, audible notification is turned on.  So there I am in my first meeting of the day and Ping Ping goes my watch.  I suppose that if they defaulted these to off few people would enable them.  So instead this forces everyone who gets an Apple Watch to go through the full list of apps on their phone and disable notification mirroring on most of them.
• I can’t help but wonder if this will open up a whole new channel for distracted driving.  Incoming texts, Tweets, Facebook notifications – all distractingly in your field of vision.  I wonder if they could add a driving mode that suppresses notifications while in-motion?

I bought the lower-priced Apple Watch Sport, which – at $400 – still makes it by far the most expensive watch I’ve ever purchased (also: the 3rd watch I’ve ever purchased).  Fortunately I can afford a $400 experiment with new technology.  For many this is still an unaffordable luxury.

What will be extremely interesting to see is what the replacement cycle looks like.  People hold onto their luxury watches for many years.  Will the Apple Watch be like an iPhone (replaced every year or two) or more like the iPad (replaced every 4 or 5 years)?

Only time will tell.