{"id":6902,"date":"2015-08-07T13:53:11","date_gmt":"2015-08-07T20:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=6902"},"modified":"2015-08-07T13:53:11","modified_gmt":"2015-08-07T20:53:11","slug":"apple-watch-is-a-necessity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2015\/08\/apple-watch-is-a-necessity\/","title":{"rendered":"When Apple Watch IS a Necessity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AppleThe Apple Watch (and all smart watches) are all the rage right now with smart people questioning whether we actually need<\/em> them at all. A top question is whether you’d drive back home to get your smart watch if you forgot to put it on, like you probably would your smart phone. Of course I don’t put myself in the “smart people” category, I’m in the “buy whatever Apple invents next” category.<\/p>\n

Over the last couple of months I’ve enjoyed my Apple Watch and I get a lot of value out of it but I wondered too whether this was something that could ever fit a critical need or whether it’s just really neato to have. This week it actually filled a critical need. <\/p>\n

I got called to jury duty in downtown Los Angeles, which is about 40 minutes away from my home during light traffic. I’ve been downtown a fair number of times but I don’t often drive myself so it’s unfamiliar to me. On my way up the 110 freeway I noticed there was a Fastrak lane, which is like a toll lane but you carry a transponder that they scan as you go under the signs and charge you. I’ll pretty much pay any fee not to sit in traffic so I got out my Fastrak transponder and flew past the other drivers.
\n
\nImagine my dismay though when I was toodling along and I saw a small sign on the left that said “HOV violation $401 minimum”. I’m pretty sure HOV stands for High-Occupancy Vehicle, and a party of 1 probably doesn’t qualify for that. I was intrigued that it was $401, not $400 too. I couldn’t get out of the lane but kept seeing Fastrak lane signs and hoped I was ok. Maybe it meant lots of people OR pay the toll? I meant to check it out when I got to the jury room but totally forgot.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the end of the day. I got in my car, spent 5 minutes trying to convince my iPhone to continue playing the podcast I was listening to on my way up and it arguing back that I REALLY should be listening to Apple Music, even though I never launched the application. I eventually win this argument but it often includes tricking it by switching to USB mode from Bluetooth and back, quitting and relaunching applications and such. It was a real joy, and I won the argument. Next up, I launched Apple Maps to navigate me home. After convincing it that I don’t live in Montana, I was good to go.<\/p>\n

I wanted to call Steve to ask him to check the rules of Fastrak before I got on the freeway, but since I was in an underground parking structure under Disney Concert Hall, I had no signal, so I HAD to wait until I got on the road. No worries, once I emerged from underground, I used Siri to call Steve. The phone range once\u2026and then rebooted. Oh no, not a nice little springboard reboot, an entire reboot. Realize what this means. It means that I cannot get into my phone because it requires my complex password after a reboot to do anything. Even Siri won’t let me call Steve back without unlocking my phone.<\/p>\n

I’m not dumb enough to think I can type and drive at the same time, and I had to keep driving because those silly people behind me on the freeway seemed to want to get home too. And then I realized that I could push the friends button on my watch without looking which brought up my circle of friends with Steve’s face already highlighted in a big button in the middle because he was the last person I chatted with. I tapped that, then the microphone and simply said CALL ME! It probably wasn’t the safest maneuver because I did have to tap the wave form to send my voice, but I was going pretty slowly and hadn’t gotten on the freeway just yet. I took the risk and it worked, Steve was able to call me back, he did the research for me and determined that I was able to use the Fastrak to get home without being fined $401.<\/p>\n

I have to say I was pretty happy to get home in 40 minutes instead of an hour because of my Apple Watch, so I would now put it in the category of an essential piece of tech in my life. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Apple Watch (and all smart watches) are all the rage right now with smart people questioning whether we actually need them at all. A top question is whether you’d drive back home to get your smart watch if you forgot to put it on, like you probably would your smart phone. Of course I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6902"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6904,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6902\/revisions\/6904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}