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A must read for all AW owners. From Apple Support

ZebraDude

ZebraDude

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 7, 2014
1,467
887
Naperville, IL
Source article: How to use your Apple Watch without your iPhone nearby

If you don't have your iPhone with you, learn what you can still do with your Apple Watch.


If you have your Apple Watch, but not your iPhone
You need your iPhone to get the most out of your Apple Watch. If your iPhone is off or you don't have it with you, you can still do these things.



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Track your workouts with the Workout app.*

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Track your goals with the Activity app.

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See the time and use the Alarm, Timer, and Stopwatch apps.

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watchos2-music-icon-graphic.png


Use the Music app to listen to synced playlists on your watch.


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Display photos from synced albums in the Photos app.


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Make purchases with Apple Pay.

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See your current heart rate.


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Relax and breathe mindfully.


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If you have a Wi-Fi connection
When your iPhone is off or out of range, your Apple Watch can use Wi-Fi networks that you've connected to previously on your iPhone. If your watch connects to one of these Wi-Fi networks,
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appears in the Settings glance and you can also do these things.

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Click to expand...
 
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Yes, it's good to know these facts; I often go out without my iPhone but with my watch recording my walk and music streaming to my earphones.
 
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I went to the doctor in another city and forgot my iPhone. Was waiting in the lobby and I received a text from my wife. Didn't even realize that I had once connected to the hospitals wi-fi years earlier. Responded using scribble and set an reminder and calendar event that was on my phone when I got home.

Sometimes we have to get used to the idea that we don't need our phone around to do so much.
 
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I need to take my phone with me a few times on runs. Just went for a run with a new AW and the GPS was not particularly accurate compared to when I run with my phone.
 
ajm222 said:
I need to take my phone with me a few times on runs. Just went for a run with a new AW and the GPS was not particularly accurate compared to when I run with my phone.
Click to expand...

Curious to know if that continues to be an issue. Perhaps it was just that specific route?
 
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Relentless Power said:
Curious to know if that continues to be an issue. Perhaps it was just that specific route?
Click to expand...

Will let you know. Not sure. My phone and the Map my Run app always track this particular route at 3.25 miles without fail. The AW suggested it was only 3 or a little less. Pretty big difference. And I know one of the watches I returned was a little inconsistent as well. My phone always followed the actual roads perfectly but when I looked at the map after runs with the AW, the line was kind of erratic at times, showing me at times running on another road that was parallel to the actual one I ran on, and it would occasionally be off when it came to distance - sometimes showing longer than my phone and sometimes shorter. Will probably try and run today with Watch and phone and see what happens.
 
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Great info. I noticed that little cloud icon the other day and had no idea what that was. Now that I think about it my phone was out of reach but I was still connected to a wifi network with my watch.
 
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Relentless Power said:
Curious to know if that continues to be an issue. Perhaps it was just that specific route?
Click to expand...

For me GPS is not as accurate was the phone but it is more than good enough to track a run.

With the watch my recorded path is sometimes displayed on the map a bit off the actually road I was running along, but I would say it's never more than 5 meters of the actual road (most of the time less), and overall it is only clearly visible when you zoom on the map and I doubt it is having much of an impact in the actual distanced cover (it thinks your are slightly away from the road, but can still see you are running along it for the same distance you actually ran).

I also noticed it mostly tends to be off when you make abrupt turns, so I am wondering whether to save battery the frequency to record GPS location isn't reduced compared to the phone (and this other thing is that of course the phone has cellular and Wi-Fi assisted GPS which makes it more accurate).
 
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i took my phone with me a few times to see if that would help. last night i decided to run with just the watch, and it was much more accurate. so running with the phone may have actually helped. will keep working with it. i know weather can sometimes make a difference. the first couple of times when it was really off, it also didn't seem to be picking up the satellite at all in certain spots. i don't know what the different colors or lines mean in the maps section of the activity app, but it showed a dotted line a few times that i assumed meant it didn't find a signal.
 
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Not a must read for all Apple Watch users
This isn't CNET or Consumer Reports
 
SoN1NjA said:
I'm just saying the title was pretty clickbait
I thought it would be a warning or something we haven't heard

Not what the owner's manual outlines
Click to expand...

That's not even with Clickbait even is. If you want to see click bait, visit Yahoo or Reddit. And the owners manual is not accessible with the Apple Watch, unless you go online. At least the Apple Watch functions were Posted by Zebra Dude, where he provided a link to each subject if you were interested in looking at it more.
 
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Relentless Power said:
That's not even with Clickbait even is. If you want to see click bait, visit Yahoo or Reddit. And the owners manual is not accessible with the Apple Watch, unless you go online. At least the Apple Watch functions were Posted by Zebra Dude, where he provided a link to each subject if you were interested in looking at it more.
Click to expand...
It's on iBooks, although for some reason the last publish date was April 2015

Strange how it's not up to date, the iPhone one gets updated after every iOS version
 
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