The Apple Watch and Working Life

The Apple watch is coming, but will it make much of an impact? The jury is out, there’s already lots of speculation about whether it will have any real value. We decided to have a look at it from the perspective of a small businesses and whether it will make an impact on your working life.

The Apple Watch is the latest bit of technology that aims to encroach on the mythical personal device; a piece of equipment that integrates with your life to smooth over the bumps that get in the way of your day. Typically, the kind of bumps imagined are, to be honest, pretty peripheral obstacles. How to get the most out of your run. How to keep in contact with your better half. How to get that night out organised. But for the average Joe, working to make a living, bumps can be very real and, on occasion, extremely intrusive.

Take a small business owner as an example, an electrician perhaps, who runs a small outfit employing five guys. If he’s lucky and his marketing is up to scratch, he’ll have his men out on jobs eight hours a day, five days a week. He’ll have work coming on a steady basis and is able to plan a timetable for the day and week ahead. But then a call arrives that he needs to respond to. A long-standing customer has had all his circuits blow and his sales office is down. He’s already working on a job himself that’s thirty miles away so he has to send one of his employees to sort it out. But which one? Who’s nearest? Who’s almost finished the job? Who’s up a ladder sorting out a junction box and is unable to pick his phone. With certain limitations, this is the kind of situation that the Apple Watch is able to cope with.

So he’s received the emergency call, taken on his Apple Watch with the use of Blue Tooth mic and earpiece. Apple’s Siri, a voice activated ‘helper’, he starts running through his employees, checking how they’re doing and when they might be ready to move on to the emergency. The third call finds his man walking out to the van, ready to go to his next job. Satisfied that this is his best option, the boss sends over the contact information for the sales office, while the employee sends back the contact for the next job. Another phone call to say that there will be a slight delay for the scheduled job and the re-assignment is complete.

All well and good, but what if the third employee is actually fifty miles from the emergency and the second employee, who hasn’t quite finished his job, would be nearer. This is a solvable problem with GPS, but here is where the Apple Watch doesn’t quite meet the need because it doesn’t come with its own GPS positioner. It can work it out, but it needs to talk to an iPhone first. So in order for the boss to make a smart decision based on GPS, he needs to be carrying his phone along with his Apple Watch.

It’s this kind of scenario that exposes the limitations. This doesn’t mean to say that for the small firm of electricians it wouldn’t have its uses. Remember that employee who’s at the top of a ladder fixing the junction box. Well imagine he comes up with a problem that he can’t work out. He needs to phone his boss for a bit of advice but he doesn’t want to go hands free from the ladder. With an Apple Watch, he only has to lean towards his wrist and ask Siri to phone his boss. With his Blue Tooth mic and ear piece his boss is soon talking into his ear, taking him through the solution. He could even sketch out a wiring configuration that would pop up on the screen.

It’s up to companies like us to create apps for new devices such as the Apple Watch, but it takes the imagination of the average user to work out how it might be applicable for everyday situations. If a daily run is the only sensible use Apple’s device might be used for, it hardly makes it worth the price. But if it saves a valued customer from going to a competitor, then it surely pays for itself over the course of a year. Or you could use it to tell the time. It does that very accurately.

We’re continually looking at new ways to make our customers lives easier. Watch this space by following us on twitter @autoalert, for all our latest developments.