Ultimate Setup: Apple Watch
How to make the most of Apple's shiny new wrist-puter
You have your Apple Watch on, and a £500 hole in you bank account. Got that wrist-waggling show-off gesture prepped for the streets? Good.
But before you go strutting your stuff and waving it in everyone’s faces, here’s a bunch of ways to help squeeze a little extra out of it.
Being a first-gen product, it’s got a few little issues which you can iron out with some handy accessories. Here are the ones that have caught our eye so far.
Spigen S330 stand (£17.99)
Have a Mac on your desk and want an Apple Watch stand to go with it? The Spigen S330 gets you that classic Mac look by coming in every colour under the sun, as long as it’s bare-aluminium silver.
So why would you want a stand for your watch? What a silly question. As the Apple Watch only lasts a day off a charge this is pretty much the only way to make it a viable alarm clock or sleep tracker as well as something to show off in the daytime.
It’s an aluminium stand that shows off the watch face at 45 degrees, and the top bit is a rubbery mount that holds the Apple Watch’s wireless charger. You don’t get one of these included, but given how Apple-y the Spigen S330 looks, its £20-ish price seems like a good deal to us.
Click strap adapter (£19.99)
The usual Apple approach for making cash is to try to make sure the punters spend as much as they can with Apple, and as little as possible elsewhere. One neat side effect of this is that you’re pretty much guaranteed a good experience, but is can’t half get expensive.
The Click strap adapter is one way to class up a basic Sport Apple Watch model with a cheap but fancier-looking strap than you get as standard. What it does is to let you use any standard 22mm watch strap by replacing the standard mount used.
It’s a great way to customise your Apple Watch outside of Apple’s ‘approved parameters’. Don’t be an iSheep all your life.
Sennheiser Momentum On-ear Wireless (£289.99)
One of the things the Apple Watch can do on its own is to stream music to a pair of wireless headphones, over Bluetooth. A recent pair well worth checking out is the Sennheiser Momentum On-ear Wireless.
These are fetching headphones that subscribe to enough style magazines to court a young crowd, without loading up on too much bass, as often happens with style headphones. As part of the move to wireless tech you also get active noise cancellation, fixing an issue with the plain old wireless version of these headphones: that pair doesn’t block out all that much noise.
You have a whopping (not all that whopping) 2GB on the Apple Watch you can load up with music. It’s enough for those jogs and gym sessions, if nothing more.
WiPowerBand (From US$89)
Here’s a very interesting accessory that we haven’t been able to check out in person yet. But it sounds like it’ll be able to fix one of the main concerns some people have with the Apple Watch.
It’s a protective strap-type thing that also doubles the Apple Watch’s battery life. There’s more to this than just plugging in an extra battery, as you might do with a phone.
The WiPowerBand encompasses the watch, and claims to mimic the official MagSafe charger, while offering a button on the side to let you control the flow of power from the ‘strap’ to the watch. It also makes sure not to block the sensors on the back, because the Apple Watch can tell when they’re on your wrist or not.
Of course, if you have the rather lovely Apple Watch, you might not want to encase it in a big red plastic eyesore like this. But if you need the functionality, it’s there.
Pre-order the WiPowerBand here
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Baseus leather strap (£10.99)
Snagged yourself a Sport Apple Watch but want to class it up a bit? Baseus offers a genuine leather strap in either black or brown for under £20. For the official Apple leather strap with buckle you’re looking at an eye-watering £109. Ouch.
Sure, the grade of the leather may not be quite as good, but for an £90 saving we think it’s worth taking a punt on a decent third-party alternative. If you’re wondering how third-party straps work, it’s actually pretty simple.
The Apple Watch uses a proprietary locking strap system: the ends of the strap slot into the watch face and clip in. Unless you buy the Click adapter or something similar you can’t just bung in any old 22mm watch strap, but you can expect to see hundreds of the things before long.
TYLT Energi 6K travel charger (£54.80)
The Apple Watch has battery issues. Not only does what watch itself only last a day off a charge, if you’re lucky, it also drains your iPhone’s battery a bit. One obvious solution: an external battery.
There are hundreds of the things about, and as both the iPhone and Apple Watch charge cables end in a good old USB port, you can use just about any of them. One that has taken our fancy recently is the TYLT Energi 6K travel charger.
It’s a 6000mAh unit — nothing too special there — but the neat bit is that a 3-pin plug slots directly into it, letting you charge it directly from the mains. It also comes with 2-pin US and EU adapters, and they can all be removed so it fits in your bag easier. Pretty smart, right?
CyClip (£25)
One for the big old TBC list is CyClip. It’s currently in Kickstarter phase and there are some concerns over whether it’ll even work, but we hope it does.
CyClip is the first bike handlebar mount we’ve seen for Apple Watch, designed to give you a nice ‘n’ clear display while you’re on your motorbike or good old leg-powered bicycle. It says you’ll be able to use it for navigation, notifications and music control.
There’s just one little (well pretty big) potential snag. How do you get the display to stay on? The Apple Watch screen is designed to time out very quickly after being used, so will this accessory work in real life? The jury’s out, but we’re hoping it will. With an iPhone in tow it could, turn the Apple Watch into a full cycle computer.
Spare Apple Watch magnetic charger (£34.99)
You already get one MagSafe charger with the Apple Watch, so why would you need another? We think it might just be the best accessory investment you make for your shiny new watch.
Put one by your bedside table and another on your desk at work (assuming you’re desk-bound) and you solve two of the biggest problems of living with an Apple Watch. First, it makes keeping the watch topped-up with juice dead easy.
Next, it eradicates the problem of having to constantly search for the charge cable. In short: embrace life, get another cable.
Buy a spare Apple Watch magnetic charger here
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X-Doria Defense Edge case (£20.99)
Scratching up your Apple Watch is the stuff of nightmares, like looking down and finding one of your ribs poking out of your side. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
While fewer people are going to embrace Watch cases than iPhone cases, the things do exist. One of the least-awful-looking early contenders is the X-Doria Defense.
Instead of wrapping your watch in plastic, it has a more Apple-like aluminium shell, with a protective rubber lining that also makes it easy to avoid ruining the feel of the watch’s buttons. If you’re looking at selling your Watch on next year when the second version is inevitably released, it’s a sensible investment — even if it does spoil the look a bit.
Plantronics Backbeat Fit (£69.99)
We’ve already looked at one pair of wireless headphones, but what about headphones for real exercise freaks? The Plantronics Backbeat Fit are some of the top wireless earphones designed specifically for sporty types.
They have a stabilising headband and an earpiece style a bit like Apple’s own EarPods. These let you hear what’s going on around you so you don’t, y’know, jog into oncoming traffic or stumble into a baby buggy.
At £70 they don’t cost the earth either. They’ll last for eight hours off a charge: enough for a marathon or two.
Andrew Williams
