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Why can't Apple Watch Make calls on Wifi?
- Thread starter PoppaKap
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It doesn't have a camera.
That kind of connectivity would give you 1 hour of battery life.
FaceTime Audio, not FaceTime Video.
You know, the FaceTime service that only transmits your voice, like a phone call?
Maybe next year's version will have expanded capabilities, including FaceTime Audio.
Are you sure about this? I thought they said it connects to the phone over wifi. It has to have a wifi chip.
I never said it lacked a WiFi chip. It lacks the ability to directly connect to a WiFi network. The WiFi chip in the watch is solely used for connecting to an iPhone.
It can connect to wifi also. They said that even if your phone isn't in range that as long as its connected to the same wifi network it will still work.
Not exactly. They did say that the watch connects to your phone over WiFi if it's out of bluetooth range, but they never mentioned networks. The watch establishes a direct connection with the phone, not the network.
I think you will have to wait much longer for that. I don't think you will see it being refreshed as frequent as iPhone's.
For that to work, the wifi connection between the phone and watch would have to be a point-to-point one and then the phone can't join an ordinary infrastructure wifi network simultaneously.
I think when the watch is out of Bluetooth range it joins the wifi network and makes phone calls via the iPhone in the exact same way as the iPad does.
I don't believe that to be accurate. Modern iPhones can have a wifi hotspot active (with devices connected to it) while the phone is connected to your regular wifi network for example.
This would essentially be the same scenario.
Who told you it didn't??
I thought Tim said basically: "and since it connects over Bluetooth AND WiFi, you do NOT have to be within Bluetooth range at home to send & receive calls".
Lol, maybe I'm missing something! =P
Edit.
Oh, you meant with no phone at all.
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You sure about that? The WiFi hotspot takes over your wifi connection and you are no longer connected to the Wifi network. Your WiFi symbol switches from Wifi to LTE and now you are sharing your LTE network over your wifi connection, not your existing WiFi connection.
It is how they want it to work.
All your contacts are on your phone. The watch is basically just a remote display with a small storage for some mp3 and pictures.
well I am pretty sure you can make normal phone calls on it/answer them.
A little more than just a remote.
I can't check the video now, but as the other poster mentioned I am pretty sure they said that the range will be better when you get home as it will use wifi to communicate to the phone.
It it was an Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi connection I don't see why being at home would make a difference, so I am also assuming the Watch can connect to a Wi-Fi access point.
There's a whole thread dedicated to this topic. The watch does not connect to a network. It only uses wifi to connect directly to the phone. There is no technical reason why this won't work - several Apple products do it already.
They were only using home as an example of one place you would regularly be further away from your phone than bluetooth range.
My guess is that the processing power it would take to directly make/host the call is greater than what the watch can handle (or handle efficiently with the battery life that it has).
When it takes a cell phone call from an iPhone, the watch is basically acting as a bluetooth headset. With as small and lightweight as bluetooth headsets have been for the past few years, it doesn't seem like they do much processing or consume much battery. The phone does all of the heavy lifting for them.
This is correct but the iPhone would only need to maintain a single Wifi connection because it isn't point-to-point. It's essentially Bonjour reincarnate - the iPhone would just have to look on the network for the Watch and vice versa.
They want to mostly limit the Watch to being an iPhone accessory, they don't want to over-promise what the Watch can do, causing it to run out of battery in no time - and people will be returning it, and it will get bad press, and we'll get battery gate, watch gate, water gate, etc, limit it to what it does great or the watch will be like a run-on sentence and just disappoint.
It's a supplement to the iPhone, not a replacement.
It's a supplement to the iPhone, not a replacement.
probably, for now. However, I think in time the watch will get some interesting software updates. One such cool feature could be WiFi calling from the watch. iOS 8 supports it as long as your carrier does, the iPhone could load the SIM/Registration info into the watch so it can work independent of the phone over WiFi
