Spent the morning watching the Arsenal match on the Peacock TV’s iPad app. The stream quality isn’t great on any of their apps for live matches, but it was good enough to watch it at the size of about 4 of my TVs stacked up, so pretty cool.
Not all was perfect though. I had a Safari page off to the side that I would look at during low points, but I still find Safari really frustrating to use. It works ok, and part of it is me, but I often have to really concentrate on a button to navigate, so it is slow. I finally figured out how to pinch so the cameras could see my hand better (before, the cameras were getting a top-down look on my pinching, and it didn’t always work). One annoying thing, I opened Instagram on Safari and unmuted a Reel. This completely stopped Peacock, which was annoying. The Peacock app can do picture-in-picture on an iPad, so I was a bit surprised by this.
To me, as I said above, everything feels a bit rough. Even Apple’s own apps don’t seem optimized for these new interfaces yet. I am getting better at using it, but I often think, “They could do a lot more here.” Like Music, I can display the album art with lyrics, but if I open “Up Next” it’s a popup over the album art. I couldn’t figure out a way to put that to the side. I would also love for them to bring a 3D visualizer to it.
I have the overhead strap set up that I can easily wear it for 2 hours now. I still wouldn’t call it comfortable, but I got used to wearing it quite quickly. As much as everyone talks about weight, I don’t notice it outside of the initial minute or two when I first put it on, then I kind of forget about it.
I still haven’t played any games. I downloaded Fruit Ninja during the football match, but once I opened it, I had to wait 2 minutes for it to load. Since it had stopped the Peacock app, I just closed it once it finished loading and haven’t gone back to it, yet.
Looking through the store, there weren’t many apps that looked cool enough I wanted to try. Things is $30, and even if I was still using it as my tracker, I don’t think I would pay that much just for the VP app. On the other hand, I should probably throw money at the developers putting out apps for it to reward them for their effort.
Anyway, I really like it and I am excited about the future of it. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone yet (and I agree with some of the really negative reviews I have read), but in a year or two this thing should be amazing if they can get app developers on board.
I must be missing something.