I’m surprised that the Apple Watch doesn’t have an included four function calculator. Seems so basic! What do you recommend?
I’m with you, the first thing I tried when I got my own Apple Watch was to add numbers and do basic math. Now you can ask your watch to solve equations like “what’s 15% of $47.00” but having a little calculator that you can tap is useful. I mean, heck, the original old school LED watches were sold by promoting how handy a calculator would be on your wrist!
Apple hasn’t yet addressed this category yet, surprisingly, but there are plenty of different options in the Apple Watch app store to explore. My favorite is free, PCalc Lite, and it works just fine both on the Watch and on your iPhone too, by happy coincidence.
Let me show you by starting with the iPhone interface:
Nice, eh? All the scientific functions you need ready to roll, with a simple interface that all makes sense.
But where this is really slick is on the Apple Watch. To start, there’s a nice Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference hidden in the Watch app icon:
The orange circle with “42” in the middle is PCalc.
Tap on it to get started and you’ll see a simple enough layout:
You can use it as a basic four function calculator, but let’s do something a bit more interesting by tapping on the blue button to get to more options:
Tap on the blue “more” button one additional time. The results are interesting:
Just a few taps and you can now easily split up a meal check based on both tip and number of people.
To demonstrate, let’s see how much each person should pay if two of us go out for meal and have a 78 tab and decide to leave a reasonably generous 17% tip:
Really quite easy and quite useful both.
Do you use a different calculator on your Apple Watch? Tell us about it in the comments!