I want to go to work without my iPhone (15). At work, the watch (Series 9 LTE) will be connected through LTE, no wifi. The phone would be at home, connected to wifi. Does it matter if I just leave it on a table, vs having it in a charger? Is there any functionality on the watch that is improved if the phone at home is charging vs not charging?
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Leaving phone at home, should it be charging?
- Thread starter johannnn
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your watch will use significantly more power without the phone near. If your office has wifi, and you can join that, it will help. If your office has weak or no cell coverage, then your battery will be even worse, since your watch has to use more power to transmit. In a couple examples I found in a quick search, it looks like you can expect about half the battery life when running on cell vs connected to the phone.
To your original question, You may not even need your phone powered on. Messages and phone calls should both go to the watch even if the phone is powered down (will depend on your provider). Mail should also work with the phone powered down since the watch can pull that directly. App notifications may or may not not happen without the phone being on, You'll have to test any apps you want to get notifications from to see if they work or not.
So as long as your phone has enough battery to make it though the day, your phone is fine unplugged.
To your original question, You may not even need your phone powered on. Messages and phone calls should both go to the watch even if the phone is powered down (will depend on your provider). Mail should also work with the phone powered down since the watch can pull that directly. App notifications may or may not not happen without the phone being on, You'll have to test any apps you want to get notifications from to see if they work or not.
So as long as your phone has enough battery to make it though the day, your phone is fine unplugged.
In practice, every office is going to have WiFi. And, while, yes, the battery will drain faster while on WiFi than when talking to the phone via Bluetooth … in practice, it’s not really noticeable.
And the battery life emphatically isn’t cut in half when out and about without the phone and relying on cellular service. It’s another case of the watch being smart enough to only turn on the radios when it needs to — and, save for when you’re making calls, it basically doesn’t need to. Again, it’ll use more battery … but almost never enough to worry about.
Of course, if you’re on the phone for hours, then, yes, of course, the battery will drain much faster. But who’s making hours-long phone calls on a Watch in the first place?
On the contrary, I would emphatically recommend keeping the phone on.
Phone calls, yes. iMessage, yes. SMS, no.
The Watch uses the phone as an SMS relay. So, the phone must be in communication with both the SMS network and the watch. The two devices could be on opposite sides of the planet, and using entirely different methods for Internet access. But they must be able to talk to each other in real time.
I would lean on the “should” in that sentence. Some accounts in some circumstances seem to lean much more heavily on the phone than others. If you’re using Apple’s iCloud mail service, it should all “just work.” If you have some other account … do some experiments before relying upon it.
There are a number of applications for the watch which are simply frontends to their phone counterparts, and require the two devices to be connected via Bluetooth. My least favorite example is the app that controls my hearing aids. My second least favorite is Duo, which does 2FA for the University’s systems.
I’d add that I spent a week with a dead phone and only the Watch. I managed everything just fine. The hearing aids can be clumsily controlled via long presses on the buttons on the units. The 2FA has a phone call fallback that went straight to the Watch. And so on. So you can absolutely manage with the phone off … but I wouldn’t recommend it. (With that giant caveat for SMS, of course.)
While true, I would add that there is no advantage to unplugging it and every reason to leave it plugged in.
I generally don’t worry about babying the batteries on my devices. But when there’s something trivial you can do that will, in general, be better for them, why not?
The biggest killer of batteries is heat — and especially charging while hot. The second-biggest is cycling. Apple’s battery management is such that you’ll be gentler on your phone leaving it plugged in. It won’t cycle, and it’s smart enough to limit charging.
Plus … knowing me … I’d get in the habit of not having it plugged in when I’m away. And then I’d forget to plug it in, and the battery will drain, and I’ll wonder why I never got that SMS — and be frustrated when I got home and discovered that I couldn’t use the phone until it got some charge on it.
So, my advice to the original poster: leave the phone plugged in. But, should you forget to plug it in, don’t sweat it.
Cheers,
b&
My previous Series 7 died after 6h being outside on LTE when I left my phone at home, whereas it could easily do 18h if I had my phone in the pocket. So it's cut more than half.
Just so I understand. Are you recommending to keep the phone plugged in because it increases my watch experience? Faster sync or whatever? Or just for the phone not to be dead when I arrive home?
Just so your phone isn't dead when you get home.
As long as your phone is on, doesn't matter if on battery or wall power.
if your phone shuts down, you will loose out on notifications from some apps. Phone calls and texts should still work (even SMS from androids, but all depends your cellular carrier)
Would be a great use of the new 80% max charge on the phone, were it tops the phone to 80% and keeps it there (or lets it drain a little and then tops back to 80%), which can keep your phone battery healthy longer.
also depending on what apps you use, you may need the phone for full features. I'd at least recommend leaving your phone in the car the first few days, just to make sure having the watch without a phone close will work for how you use it. I'd also recommend taking a charger with you, They do make battery banks with a watch charger built in, so you can top up wherever.