With the Apple Watch now in the hands of customers, some smart people have started commenting on the device and sharing their first impressions.

A recurring theme in my RSS feeds today has been the wish for third-party additions to complications and watch faces.

Jason Snell writes:

The third-party story is going to be huge as time goes on. Current third-party apps are okay, but they’re incredibly limited. With some of Apple’s built-in apps, you can get a better sense of what might be possible on this device. But I have to admit, I’m most excited by the idea of third-party watch faces or, at the very least, third-party complications for existing watch faces. I’m not convinced that developers will make pretty watch faces—I’ve seen all the awful third-party Pebble faces—but I do want more variety in my watch faces. I’d be fine if Apple took a strong hand with faces and only approved a very small number that passed a very high bar. But I’d be okay if Apple kept tight control of the faces… if developers could provide data from their apps as complications on existing faces. I’d love to plug in my Weather Underground temperature, for instance—today Apple’s standard temperature widget was a full ten degrees off of the actual temperature in my town.

Casey Liss shared similar thoughts:

Like third-party watch faces, I think third-party complications could take a turn toward awful. However, with a light hand and an eye toward brevity, allowing third parties to create their own complications could make an already impressive information appliance even more useful.

And here’s Abdel Ibrahim:

I still believe that apps on Apple Watch are mostly meant to be repositories. The idea of pressing in the Digital Crown and tapping a tiny icon to get to the home screen and launch an app still makes little sense to me. As of right now, the future of the Watch seems to me to be in meaningful Glances, Notifiations, Faces, and Complications (provided Apple allows the latter two). In some cases, like with Uber for example, I can see the need for launching an app. But in most cases, I still don’t see why I should bother.

Between WatchKit and the lack of personalization in some areas of the software, initial limitations of the Watch are creating a whole crop of low-hanging fruit for the next few years.

Luma Labs’ Greg Koenig, writing for iMore:

It’s no surprise that questions are being raised about just how durable each variant of the Apple Watch will be, given that people are now considering putting down real money for them. The best way to answer such questions is to wait and see how the first wave of watches do in the hands of real people. Yet it’s not unreasonable for potential early adopters to want at least some idea before they buy. Lucky for us, Apple is using materials and techniques that have been standard for wristwatches going back a few decades, so we can make some educated, experience-driven assumptions about how the watch variants will fair on our wrists soon.

Fascinating read on the materials and processes used by Apple. See also: Koenig’s analysis of Apple’s promo videos from March.

As usual, the iFixit team flew to Australia to get a new Apple device before anyone else and tear it down in just a few hours. Based on their conclusions, it doesn’t sound like offering upgradeable components for a second generation model would be possible. Also, iFixit made some interesting discoveries about the heart rate sensor and the Digital Crown.

Ahead of tomorrow’s public launch, Apple has posted their official Apple Watch User Guide today, which can be found here. The guide covers the basics of Apple Watch, default apps by Apple, and more.

Also, the company has uploaded the full set of Guided Tours for Apple Watch, including the last videos for Apple Pay, Activity, and Workout. You can find them in Apple’s YouTube playlist here.

Vogue’s Scarlett Kilcooley-O’Halloran, quoting Jony Ive from today’s Condé Nast International Luxury Conference in Florence, Italy:

“I think that we’re on a path that Apple was determined to be on since the Seventies, which was to try and make technology relevant and personal. If people struggle to use the technology then we have failed,” said Ive. “The consequences of that path? I don’t know. Sadly so much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness - something that was built to a price point or a schedule. The products that we have developed describe who made them. I hope that people will like the watch and find it a beautiful item.”