The main reason I bought the Series 10 is to putz around the house listening to podcasts off the speaker. It's not loud enough to be used anywhere else, but it seemed perfect as a wearable speaker for solitary home use without carrying my iPhone around from room to room and without Airpods in my ears.
Unfortunately, the watch prefers using bluetooth to stream podcast episodes via the phone, rather than streaming directly off its own wifi connection.
So everytime I get a *bit* too far from my phone while walking around the house, podcast playback stutters and stops, because I'm close enough that it's connected to the phone via bluetooth but too far to maintain a stable connection for streaming audio. The software is not smart enough to switch to wifi when this happens, or even re-establish streaming when I'm back near the phone. I don't have this issue if the episode is already downloaded to the watch, but sometimes an episode drops in the middle of the day, and I'd have to return my watch to its charging cradle and wait for a long time for it to download over from the phone.
The solution I've found now:
1. Turn off bluetooth by using "Hey Siri, turn off bluetooth". This severs the iPhone connection and forces the Apple Watch to stream over wifi.
2. Start streaming my podcast. Works perfect.
3. Once I'm done listening, turn bluetooth back on using Siri.
Toggling bluetooth would be so much easier if Control Center on the watch had a Bluetooth toggle to sever phone connection, but alas, Apple has decided that noone should be doing this. Note that using Siri to re-enable bluetooth will also cause the iPhone Siri to pick up the request if it's nearby, because it's disconnected from the watch, and so they can't negotiate which Siri should take the request, which adds a bit more cringe to the situation.
Apple could thoroughly solve this problem by giving us a setting to always stream media over the watch's own internet connection. I will take the battery life hit. It's frustrating to see so many caveats this year with Apple's releases... they just left the feature half-built for its most likely use case.
Unfortunately, the watch prefers using bluetooth to stream podcast episodes via the phone, rather than streaming directly off its own wifi connection.
So everytime I get a *bit* too far from my phone while walking around the house, podcast playback stutters and stops, because I'm close enough that it's connected to the phone via bluetooth but too far to maintain a stable connection for streaming audio. The software is not smart enough to switch to wifi when this happens, or even re-establish streaming when I'm back near the phone. I don't have this issue if the episode is already downloaded to the watch, but sometimes an episode drops in the middle of the day, and I'd have to return my watch to its charging cradle and wait for a long time for it to download over from the phone.
The solution I've found now:
1. Turn off bluetooth by using "Hey Siri, turn off bluetooth". This severs the iPhone connection and forces the Apple Watch to stream over wifi.
2. Start streaming my podcast. Works perfect.
3. Once I'm done listening, turn bluetooth back on using Siri.
Toggling bluetooth would be so much easier if Control Center on the watch had a Bluetooth toggle to sever phone connection, but alas, Apple has decided that noone should be doing this. Note that using Siri to re-enable bluetooth will also cause the iPhone Siri to pick up the request if it's nearby, because it's disconnected from the watch, and so they can't negotiate which Siri should take the request, which adds a bit more cringe to the situation.
Apple could thoroughly solve this problem by giving us a setting to always stream media over the watch's own internet connection. I will take the battery life hit. It's frustrating to see so many caveats this year with Apple's releases... they just left the feature half-built for its most likely use case.
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