Items tagged with watchos
For some people that purchases an Apple Watch Series 4, upgrading to watchOS 5.1 was simply a nightmare. WatchOS 5.1 was supposed to be simple maintenance release when it was made available to customers last week alongside iOS 12.1 and macOS Mojave. However, some Apple Watch Series 4 owners quickly found that the update rendered their fancy new smartwatches inoperable. For some undisclosed reason, applying the update would force the Apple Watch to become stuck at the boot screen, which displays the Apple logo. No amount of resetting or shouted profanity was enough for the end-user to fix the issue by himself (or herself). In fact, the only way to resolve the problem was to...
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If you have an Apple Watch Series 4 and successfully updated your device to watchOS 5.1, consider yourself lucky. Apple released iOS 12.1, mac OS Mojave 10.14.1, and watchOS 5.1 yesterday alongside the launches of the MacBook Air, Mac Mini and iPad Pro. However, many people updating to watchOS 5.1 found that instead of enabling new features and security update, the software instead bricked their smartwatches. A Reddit thread is littered with people that tried performing the update, only to have their Apple Watch Series 4 become bricked during the process. In this case, "bricked" means that the Apple Watch is stuck on boot screen which displays the Apple...
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For as long as the Apple Watch has existed, developers have been asking Apple to let them make their own custom watch faces, a feature that customers would likely enjoy as well. Now in the third generation of the Apple Watch, developers are still not unable to do so. That may change, however, in a future version of watchOS. The feature was potentially hinted in a breakdown of the beta code for watchOS 4.3.1. The code in question has to do with a component of the NanoTimeKit framework. This is the part that is responsible for watch faces. Contained within is a log message referencing currently unavailable developer tools that appear designed to allow communication with XCode running on a Mac....
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Bugs seem to be a common occurrence when it comes to iOS and macOS these days. That became even more apparent this week after Italian bloggers discovered that you can crash iOS devices (i.e. iPhones and iPads) with a single text message. The bug is actually quite easy to pull off, and involves sending an Indian language (Telugu) character to an iPhone. Once the person receives the text, the iOS Springboard crashes. After that point, the Messages apps can no longer be opened, as it will continually crash while it attempts to load the "offending" character. The only way to break out of the crash cycle with Messages is to have one of your contacts send you a "clean" text message, after which the...
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More often than not, when someone goes out shopping for a smartwatch, they end up purchasing an Apple Watch. That leaves second place up for grabs between Tizen and Android Wear, and for the first time ever the former overtook the latter in market share. According to data collected by Strategy Analytics, Tizen jumped ahead of Android Wear in the first quarter of 2017 to grab a 19 percent share of the smartwatch OS market, edging out Android Wear at 18 percent. Those figures give Samsung reason to feel vindicated in its decision to move away from Android Wear and go all-in with Tizen in the wearables market. That may not have seemed like a smart decision two years ago when Tizen's share of the...
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Cupertino, we have a problem. There has been a rash of complaints from Apple Watch owners that applying the recently released watchOS 3.1.1 update ends up bricking their pricey wearable, rendering it a still fashionable but non-functional wrist accessory. In response to those complaints, Apple has pulled the update offline, leaving watchOS 3.1 as the most recent version available.The issue seems to mostly affect Apple Watch Series 2 devices. Not everyone with a second generation Apple Watch who installed the watchOS 3.1.1 update ended up with a bricked wearable, though it is not clear why some have failed while others have not.Source: Reddit (Moust4ki)Those with affected handsets report seeing...
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If you’re an Apple Watch user, chances are that you’ve spent a frustrating amount of time staring at your smartwatch’s display screen, waiting for it to accomplish a task. Be it pulling up a map or something as simple as retrieving weather information, using your Apple Watch for anything actually useful (other than telling time and viewing notifications) can be a test of your patience. To combat this performance headache, Apple is requiring that all watchOS apps be native (and built using the watchOS 2 SDK) by June 1st. When the Apple Watch launched last year running watchOS 1.0, only Apple apps were granted “native” status. All third-party apps, on the other hand, had all the heavy lifting and...
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Well, look what the cat dragged in. It appears that the folks over at Nokia were well on their way towards releasing a smartwatch that would have competed in a market that is starting to swell with Tizen-, Android Wear-, and watchOS-based offerings. However, Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services division in 2014 put an end to what was known internally as project Moonraker. Although most know Moonraker as the 1979 film starring Roger Moore as James Bond, Nokia’s Moonraker was actually a colorful smartwatch that looks similar in design to Sony’s Smartwatch 3. Existence of Moonraker was first discovered by serial leaker Evan Blass, who discovered a Tumblr page featuring the device...
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Apple had some rather sedate announcements for both OS X (El Capitan) and iOS (iOS 9) earlier today, and with the exception of Split View for iPads, nothing was really groundbreaking. That same sentiment carries over to Apple’s newest operating system: WatchOS. WatchOS was first shown off last year at the iPhone 6/iPhone 6 Plus keynote, and Apple is already looking to its second iteration of the Apple Watch's operating system: WatchOS 2. The biggest addition to WatchOS 2 is the support for native apps. For anyone that’s used an Apple Watch, you know that third-party apps can sometimes be a chore to endure as they are basically running on your iPhone and beamed over to the Apple Watch. That leads...
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With the launch of iOS 7, Apple made it harder for thieves to reuse stolen iPhones and iPads by enabling Activation Lock within Find My iPhone. One year later, with the release of iOS 8, Apple enabled Activation Lock by default on iOS devices. Without having access to the original owner’s Apple ID and password, a stolen device is absolutely useless — even if the device is somehow reset. Since Activation Lock was first introduced, iPhone thefts in New York, San Francisco, and London fell by 25 percent, 40 percent, and 50 percent respectively. With that said, another popular Apple device is gaining attention today for its lack of Activation Lock — that device is none other than the Apple Watch....
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Pre-orders for the Apple Watch open up on April 10, and the device is scheduled to gone on sale two weeks later. Analysts seem to be tripping all over themselves to project how big the opening weekend of sales will be for the Apple Watch, and Piper Jaffray is the latest to throw in its two cents. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster is projecting that Apple will take in 300,000 pre-orders within the first 24 hours and that the company will sell one million units within the first weekend. Munster expands upon those figures, stating that the Apple Watch will have an 8 percent attach rate with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners. Speaking with CNBC, Munster went on to add, “This first wave is mostly the fanboys.”...
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Well, it’s about time that we get some concrete details on battery life and pricing for the Apple Watch – Apple definitely delivered today at its keynote address, but the news is disappointing on many fronts. The Apple Watch will get 18 hours of battery life under typical usage scenarios, which Apple CEO Tim Cook says “works for most people.” With the Pebble Time achieving 7 days of battery life and the Pebble Time Steel boosting that figure to 10 days, we don’t know if “works for most people” is the correct phrase to use here. But I digress… Moving on to other important matters at hand, Cook also announced official pricing for the Apple Watch, and I hope that you have a seat nearby to rest your...
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