Guided Tours illuminate Apple Watch features

Apple is tiding over — or perhaps cruelly taunting — its curious crowd with short videos about the Apple Watch called Guided Tours.

Cleverly, the company is not releasing all Guided Tours at once; rather, a handful are unlocked for viewing each day. In other words, as if the website weren’t highly trafficked enough leading up to the April 10th Apple Watch pre-order, the marketing masterminds have found yet another way to get consumers to the online outpost on a repeat basis.

One by one, the Guided Tours both dispel confusion over Apple Watch features and push potential users closer to a purchase. The Tours are clean, simple and succinctly convince you why you cannot live another day without the ability to send your heartbeat to “the people you care about most.” (The answer, according to Apple? You can feel another’s heartbeat, and what’s more deeply connective than that?)

Messages, Faces and Digital Touch (a.k.a., Force Touch) are the subjects of the Tours so far. Phone Calls, Siri, Maps, Music, Apple Pay, Activity and Workout are soon to come. All seem to be pushing the “Do things you can’t do with your phone!” agenda.

Without further ado, here’s what we’ve seen — and what we think — so far.

Messages: Under Messages, we learn how to dismiss a message with a flick of the wrist or respond with a “smart reply,” which you’ve programmed through the Apple Watch app on your iPhone. But nothing beats dictating your response into your watch à la Dick Tracy. And who honestly cares about the animated emojis? Apple sure is proud of them, so there must be a voracious (and affluent) market beneath my own age bracket.

Faces: The Apple Watch face is highly customizable through three easy-to-configure screens. What’s particularly helpful is the ability to choose whatever additional information you’d like to continuously display on the watch face (temperature, calendar, and moon phases for the astronomers out there). If you want to know more about any of the aforementioned information, simply click on the snippet on the watch face to open the full, corresponding app.

Digital Touch: Force Touch is pretty exceptional, and this is where Apple somewhat forcefully (no pun intended) pushes the personal, emotional agenda. The side button will always take you to “the people you like to connect with most.” Send your friend a tap, and they’ll feel the tap pattern as you created it. And to really tug at the heartstrings is the heartbeat function. With the push of two fingers, send yours to a loved one also wearing an Apple Watch. They will not only see the pulsation, but feel it. Hopefully they love you back and will send you their own flutter patterns without leaving you hanging.

We’ll unpack the rest of the Guided Tours as they are revealed. As of now, we’re looking to dive into functions that are a bit meatier and less flowery. Drawing a picture is neat and all, but let’s see the rundown on how to pay for my groceries, track my activity, and catch a ride — all without pulling out my phone.

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