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.
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 recently renewed my Garmin watch and I did the same: disable all the phone related features.
And one of the Reddit comments quoted in the article says the same:
> Apple Watch is a Smartwatch with fitness features, Garmin is a Fitness watch (with admittedly lacking) smartwatch features.
People still buy Garmin watches instead of Apple Watch because they don't want the "smart" stuff, they want the fitness stuff first.
And yeah, the battery life is also a big factor!
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.
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 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.