Apple Watch Best Apps Review: Maps, Music, Activity, Workout, Twitter Apps

With the Apple Watch becoming available for pre-order from April 10 and shipping by April 24, reviewers have finally gotten hold of the device and have started grading the apps on it.

As expected they discovered that the best apps on the device were those preinstalled by Apple while the bad ones were the third-party creations that are slow to launch and provide little helpful information.

The Best

The Maps app on the Apple Watch, which provides directions, is one of the best. Another useful app is the Passbook app, which allows storage of digital boarding passes and tickets.

The Music app has also been getting high marks from reviewers even though many have noted that it is not very intuitive as users will have to indicate when they want to listen to music on their iPhone or Apple Watch.

The Activity app is also one of the best on the device. It uses three rings to monitor the wearer's activity level and indicates when goals have been achieved.

The Workout app is another built-in app and it is helpful when users want to find out how many calories they burnt during walking, running or jogging.

Coming to social media, the Twitter app is a standout as it is best fashioned to handle reading of tweets, retweeting and replying via dictation. As for other third-party apps that make it to the best list, they include MLB.com which offers a lot of information including scores and stats.

The Bad

Even though the Remote app is one of the pre-installed apps on the Apple Watch, it does not come with all the features of an Apple Remote and cannot turn the Apple TV on but can only be used to pause, play and swipe between programs. The Mail app is also another surprisingly ineffective app as it does not allow users to dictate email. They can only read or discard email they receive.

As for news apps on the Apple Watch, there are several including CNN, Flipboard and The New York Times. But they are severely limited since they only display the headline with a short summary. People have to resort to using their phone if they want to read the full story.

Finally, Glances just do not work well on the Apple Watch and is extremely slow when used to check the status of apps installed on the paired iPhone.