With my Apple Watch, I don’t need my phone when I’m running, swimming or at the gym. I can receive and return texts, make and receive calls and listen to music either stored on the watch or streamed over cellular.
That's funny, phone related features are the first things I turn off on my Garmin watch when I set it up. The last thing I want is my wrist buzzing off when I am focused lol. In fact, any notifications on my wrist are just flat out obnoxious.
I'll take my multiple weeks of battery life for a single charge on the Forerunner 965. The data and analytics are fantastic as well.
I'm pretty happy with the level of "smart" integration on my Garmin watch. For me, that's "shows me a preview of incoming SMS and Telegram messages" and the contact name when I receive a phone call. Plus the syncing of fitness activities. I do go back-and-forth on whether I want it to buzz or not, but that roughly overlaps between when I'm wearing the watch in the first place, so that has worked out well in my particular case.
It fits well into my general philosophy of smartphone notifications, where real humans are allowed to buzz or make noise (phone calls / text messages) and everything else waits silently in the notification drawer until I choose to look at the phone.
The point of that comment wasn't to suggest that you couldn't also silence notifications on an Apple Watch, it was to illustrate that the ability to receive these notifications isn't as relevant to Garmin's watches' target market as it is to the Apple Watch's.
I wish I could just use the watch for everything and dump the phone. It does some ham fisted stuff to prevent this. For example, the watch Bluetooth stack detects that it is connected to a car stereo and refuses to work.
I play music in my car over bluetooth only from my watch. Works even without having the iPhone nearby. But yes, I agree with you. The Apple Watch can and should support almost all features the iPhone has. Three features I would like to see: hotspot, switching apps while on call, and Airplay music to soundbars.
It's kind of a sloppy solution, but what about using a Bluetooth to aux adapter? You would lose the dashboard audio controls but at least you can listen to your stuff.
The Apple Watch has had a cellular option since 2017 with a built in eSIM.
There is a separate number as far as billing. But the cellular carrier pairs your cellular watch with an iPhone on the same network. So calls come in and go out as if they were coming from your iPhone’s number. Whenever someone calls your phone - they both ring.
If your phone is on and close enough to your watch so they are connected via Bluetooth (or WiFi?), all data and voice communication is relayed through your phone to save battery life.
If your watch isn’t connected to your phone, the Watch uses cellular.
Roaming support for Apple Watches was just announced in 2022 and is still not ubiquitous
As far as I know, the watch’s eSIM technically has its own phone number, but the mobile provider does some backend stuff to make it look like it is using your iPhone’s phone number.
We got 3 cellular watches for our kids and set them up on one parent phone using the family connection thing. Each watch used only the phone number assigned to it, for both phone calls and messaging. Maybe they do things differently if you set it up in that way.
As an only device for kids, it was about 80% there and over the course of a few years Apple made 0 progress, so we gave up on it as a concept. Only 1 kid still wears the watch; the other two are e-waste.
The swimming tracking seems magical to me. It counts laps and even identifies what stroke I’m doing (although I need to have a pause if I change strokes to let it accurately catch the change of stroke).
