Apple watch's Dubai test for extreme resistance
Did Apple engineers do desert duning in Dubai in extreme hot weather to test the resistance of Apple Watch?
Apple is said to have conducted a year-long testing programme covering various aspects and weather conditions and collected over 18 hours of health and fitness data before the Apple watch was officially unveiled.
According to American media organisation ABC News, Dubai was one of the testing grounds.
“We have travelled to Alaska and gone to Dubai to really test Apple Watch in all those environments,” said an ABC report quoting Jay Blahnik, Apple Watch engineer who earlier worked with Nike.
Apple gave ABC access to its top secret health and fitness lab where its engineers tested various functionalities of the Apple Watch for over an year. Apple also said that its engineers who did not know what product they were testing completed 10,000 hours of workout sessions to collect the data required.
The Youtube video posted by tech blog MacRumors shows the behind-the-scenes look at Apple's top-secret health and fitness lab that was broadcast on the Nightline programme on ABC.
https://youtu.be/mfcAoCVQcN0
Apple has programmed the watch to perform with two key fitness-focused apps Activity and Workout.
On the back of the case, a ceramic cover with sapphire lenses protects a specially designed sensor that uses infrared and visible-light LEDs and photodiodes to detect the user’s heart rate during workouts and when using the heart rate Glance.
This allows Apple Watch to provide a comprehensive picture of workouts and daily activity, suggest personal activity goals, and reward you for reaching personal fitness milestones.
Here’s a detailed video explaining the health and fitness features within the smart watch.
https://youtu.be/CPpMeRCG1WQ
Blahnik in an earlier memo to company executives describes Apple’s initiatives in developing the features as historic. “We had a lot to learn to make the best product possible… We needed to study the conditions in which the device would be worn and build expertise on how to measure all-day activity and exercise. At the scale we sell our product, we couldn’t just use off-the-shelf algorithms. We needed to build our own knowledge base from the ground up. In many ways, the health and fitness research and testing we have done is historic. We’ve studied more people, in more conditions than most university research has ever done,” he says.
The pre-orders for the watch will start in the US and other select markets on April 10. The product will hit retail stores on April 24 and is expected to reach UAE via the grey market within the next few days.