Group Works

Apple Watch web browser

08/09/2024, 12:00

3 minutes

For the first time Ap­ple Watch has a func­tional browser in the WatchOS 11 pub­lic beta ahead of the new Ap­ple Watch launch on the 9th Sep­tem­ber. Be­fore the big thing was the in­tro­duc­tion of cook­ies. Now Ap­ple Watch sup­ports abil­ity to have pop up WiFi links where it can log you into the net­work or sim­ply let you ac­cept the terms of ser­vice and in­put your email and you will be good to go.

The Play

Since the in­tro­duc­tion of the iPhone, Steve Jobs had es­tab­lished the tri­fecta of the iPhone. The three things that the phone needs to do well:

  1. Calling and Messaging
  2. Music Playback
  3. Mobile Web browsing

This is a very in­ter­est­ing turn of events for Ap­ple as the com­pany has al­ways sep­a­rated iPhone and Ap­ple Watch as two sep­a­rate de­vices, where you would not use Ap­ple Watch for web brows­ing. Now Ap­ple is ac­tively de­vel­op­ing the tech­nolo­gies right un­der our noses. How­ever the com­pany just doesn’t see the fea­ture as yet ready to be used as a sell­ing point. You can ac­cess web­sites and the Ap­ple Watch will log you right in through cook­ies. Also a lot of fea­tures that are used by mod­ern browsers in re­gards to JavaScript that been quite well im­ple­mented. This in­cludes email and pass­word sug­gest­ing, show­ing that the Watch has im­ple­men­ta­tions di­rectly from the iCloud pass­words that are saved on your ac­count.

You might be say­ing to me “The Ap­ple Watch has al­ways al­lowed you to look up links.” True, how­ever the Ap­ple Watch has never al­lowed you to have a rich and a mod­ern web ex­pe­ri­ence be­fore watchOS 11. This just shows the di­rec­tion that Ap­ple is tak­ing with the watch is very in­ter­na­tional, since they wouldn’t put in en­ergy into some­thing they don’t be­lieve is go­ing to be­come the foun­da­tion for the next OS. Ap­ple builds it­er­a­tively and slowly over each up­date un­til the fea­ture is ready and fully func­tional.

This is not a co­in­ci­dence, since Ap­ple is ru­moured to be shuf­fling the lineup to have larger screen sizes. Small­est Ap­ple Watch (cur­rently at 41mm) is go­ing to have the largest Ap­ple Watch’s screen (cur­rently at 45mm) and cur­rently the largest stan­dard Ap­ple Watch be­ing at 45mm is mov­ing to 49mm. So the largest Ap­ple Watch will be shar­ing its dis­play panel with the Ap­ple Watch Ul­tra un­less the ru­mours are wrong and Ap­ple Watch Ul­tra is go­ing to have a com­pletely dif­fer­ent panel. It is very hard with leaks and ru­mours be­cause they are not al­ways re­li­able. We can spec­u­late that since Ap­ple is re­leas­ing a new S10 chip on the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion 3nm proces­sor we can be con­fi­dent that the new Ap­ple Watch is go­ing to have amaz­ing new ca­pa­bil­i­ties func­tion­ally as it is go­ing to be more pow­er­ful and ef­fi­cient than ever be­fore.

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