The much-hyped Apple Watch finally lands this month, and the tech firm is hoping its first ever wearable grabs the attention of consumers from the get-go.
For that to have any hope of happening, the watch needs to launch with enough apps to keep users spinning that Digital Crown and swiping about the tiny display. And for that to happen, notable names need to get involved.
Venerable news outlet the New York Times, for one, is ready with its Apple Watch app, which it announced on Tuesday.
It’s pushing its new Apple smartwatch software as a quick way to get a simple overview of a news event via what it’s calling “one-sentence stories.”
The news snippets, covering sections such as business, politics, and the arts, will be crafted “specially for small screens,” the news organization said, describing its smartwatch approach as “a new form of storytelling.”
It even plans to squeeze photos onto the screen related to the short, bulleted news summaries.
If a particular story piques your interest, you can use Apple’s Handoff feature to read the full article on your iPhone or iPad. Alternatively, you can tap ‘save for later’ so you can read the whole piece at a more convenient time.
“Editors on three continents will be dedicated to The Times’s core mobile apps, including Watch, 24 hours a day,” the news outlet said.
The app launches when the Apple Watch goes on sale on April 24, and is free to use.
With Apple’s first smartwatch just days from hitting stores, analysts are now setting out to risk their reputations with predictions on how well it’ll sell. Among them is Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, who said this week he thinks Apple Watch sales could reach one million units over its first weekend, a figure that includes pre-orders, which start on April 10. Munster adds that by the end of 2015 he expects Apple Watch sales to hit eight million. However, the Cupertino company’s decision to make it hard for us to know exactly how many smartwatches it sells means we may have a hard time finding out the true figure.
