Gallery: Our 10 Favorite New Features Headed to the Apple Watch
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New Faces. Do you have a photo of Johnny Rotten (your English bulldog) on your phone's lock screen? You can now make his mug your watch face, too. Select an entire photo album and you'll see a new picture every time you glance at the watch. Apple is also making some cool time-lapse animations of major cities that change based on the time of day.
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New Complications. In watch-speak, a complication is the term for anything other than the time that's displayed on the face. Date, moon phase—complications. With the next version of watchOS, you'll be able to place your own complications on the watch, from flight info, to appointments, to the status of your IoT devices.
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Time Travel. Want to see what you're supposed to be doing in six hours? Take a peek at tomorrow morning's meeting schedule? In watchOS 2, you can just spin the digital crown to go forward and backward in time. Your complications will show information relevant to whatever hour of the day you've zipped to.
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Change Settings With the Crown. Any app that supports this functionality will let you adjust its settings by twisting the digital crown. In his on-stage demo, Apple's Kevin Lynch adjusted the interior temperature of his car, parked downstairs in the garage, by spinning the crown.
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Nightstand. When your watch is charging on your bed-side table, you can now flip it on its side and still view the time—the clock rotates 90 degrees to make it easier to read. Also, when in this mode, the watch will wake you up with a gentle alarm sound as the clock changes color and pulses.
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Adding Friends. Soon you'll be able to sort the list of contacts on your watch into groups. You can have different groups for friends, family, and work contacts. Each group will be able to hold a dozen contacts. Your friends are identified by their initials, or by tiny pictures of their faces.
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Reply to Mail. Because what you really need is more ways to answer email, the next version of watchOS will let you reply to emails directly on the watch face. Of course, you can instantly trash emails from the watch as well, which might be the best feature of this new interaction.
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FaceTime Calls. Support for FaceTime Audio calls is coming to watchOS 2. The next time you get pinged over Apple's native VoIP service, you'll see it on your watch with the option to answer, just like a regular phone call.
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Transit. With all of the enhancements to Apple Maps on OS X and iOS 9, it's only natural the Watch gets some additional maps mojo too. Any transit directions you look up on your phone can be sent to the watch, which will guide you by tapping your wrist, and you can initiate new directions by asking Siri through the watch.
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Tetherless Wi-Fi. When you walk into range of a known Wi-Fi network, your watch will be able to connect to the network and initiate services without having to tether to your phone first. It's another small step toward the Apple Watch being able to operate as an independent computing device.
