Catching that Pokemon has just become more convenient and physically healthy. Pokemon Go is now available on the Apple Watch, allowing players of the widely popular mobile game to use the smartwatch to catch pocket monsters and collect PokeStops items.
What's more, Pokemon Go players can log their activity as workouts, creating a record of their physical activity while playing the augmented reality game. To do this, the new Pokemon Go app for the Apple Watch will use the smartwatch's fitness tracker, offering both a fun gaming experience and physical activity, TechCrunch reports.
That means Pokemon Go players will be able to find out how many steps they have taken and how far they walked while playing it through the Apple Watch. Indeed, playing it involves a lot of exercises. According to the game's creator Niantic, so-called Pokemon Go trainers walked more than 8.7 billion kilometers while watching 88 billion Pokemon so far.
However, although Pokemon Go might encourage exercise, a recent study by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health has shown that the spike in physical activity is short-lived. The research, which involved more than a thousand Pokemon Go trainers aged 18 to 35, showed that the number of steps they walked increased only from the first to sixth weeks before declining.
The Pokemon Go app for the Apple Watch is not the full version, and so players still have to use their smartphones, CNET reports. The smartwatch app acts more like a companion to Pokemon Go's smartphone version with the specific tasks of tracking a player's steps, helping players stock up on items to catch Pokemon, and sending notifications whenever there's a Pokemon in an area.
According to a Pokemon Go blog entry, the Apple Watch app will also calculate the distance between hatching Pokemon Eggs and getting Candy with one's Buddy Pokemon, and notify players when there's a PokeStop nearby, as well as when Eggs hatch and medals are given.
