“A survey of how U.S. consumers use their smartwatches produced mostly unsurprising results,” Ben Lovejoy reports for 9to5Mac. “Notifications and texts are of course the most frequent use, with activity-tracking number two.”
“But one stat did rather jump out at me: NPD’s data, collated by Statista, claims that a full 26% of smartwatch owners use them ‘daily’ for phone calls,” Lovejoy reports. “”
“While current Apple Watch models don’t have the ability to handle standalone calls, they do allow you to make or receive iPhone calls on your watch provided that it’s within range,” Lovejoy reports. “This isn’t expected to change even with the upcoming LTE model, which is reported to limit use of the eSIM to data connections.”
Read more, and participate in the poll, here.
MacDailyNews Take: We only find ourselves taking phone calls on Apple Watch when our iPhone isn’t handy (buried in a pocket or bag) and, especially, when we expect the call to be a quick one. It’s definitely not a daily thing for us, but it is, perhaps, a weekly occurrence. Frankly, we don’t use voice calling that much anyway, even on our (misnamed) iPhones or any other “telephone.” We conduct more voice calls on our Macs than we do on anything else.
We do want to be able to make/take any emergency calls while without our iPhones (say, on a run) with our Apple Watches, but we’ll settle for data – as long as we can communicate via text with our Apple Watches (as we do now, but without our iPhones present), we’ll be all set.