GoPro goes to the wrist with Apple Watch control

Apple Watch owners with a love for filming their exploits with action cameras may have just been given one more reason to pick GoPro over the competition: controls on a smartwatch.

This week, GoPro has announced that its GoPro app for iOS is now Apple Watch compatible, delivering a start and stop record button to an Apple Watch, while also being able to change capture modes and preview what shots look like.

You won’t, unfortunately, be using this update to watch the camera through your watch, and that’s probably a good thing given it’ll just lead you to walking into a wall of some kind, but you can at least set it up to control the camera simply by touching your watch, letting you keep that phone in a nearby pocket or small piece of luggage.

The app will also deliver a few improvements to the iOS and Android app, such as being able to snag photos from videos, while media filtering has also been brought to the app.

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But the real catch here is the GoPro app for Apple Watch, with no direct counterpart for either a Google Android Wear watch or even Samsung’s Tizen-based devices, giving Apple a slight edge if this sort of feature is important to you.

Testing it this week, the feature is pretty easy to get the hang of, and once the app is loaded, you’ll use the digital crown to change modes, alternating between video, photo, burst, and time-lapse, while the red record button stays the same.

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You can even see the shot before it happens simply by swiping to the next screen, which our GoPro Hero4 Silver was only too happy to accomodate. That said, the feature should work with any recent GoPro, from the 3+ all the way through the 4 series, and up to the Session. Pretty much, if it supports the app, it’ll work with the Apple Watch.

What you won’t see, at least from our testing, is the multi-camera support, and you will still need the dedicated wireless remote for that.

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Regardless, GoPro owners will see this Apple Watch feature roll out immediately with the next update, provided they have an Apple Watch and an iPhone, and for those of you with Android watches, we can’t imagine this is hard to do there either, so it might be time to start sending those frantic email