Apple Watch Review Diary - Making/Receiving Phone Calls


One of the more flashy features is the Apple Watch's ability to basically be a speaker phone for your iPhone. You can make and receive calls directly from your wrist.

The phone function works pretty well. Callers said I sounded fine even at various arm positions, although closer obviously sounded better. I doubt I'll use this much, but I think it will be very handy for answering calls when the phone was in a different room. Rather than chasing down the phone before it goes to voice mail, I can answer on my wrist, for example.

The handoff feature works well to transfer to my iPhone. I just have to click handoff or green status bar on the iPhone screen and it seamlessly goes over to the iPhone. It doesn't appear it works the other way from iPhone to Apple Watch.

I was also curious about how well the Apple Watch could work as a car phone. Considering if I'm driving with my hands at 10 and 2, it could potentially work. The callers said the audio sounds OK, but not great. Basically like a typical car speakerphone without good microphone isolation. On my side, I could hear the caller, but it was kind of hard to hear over the road noise. It would be nice if the speaker was a few notches louder.

Last thing I wanted to note was the Apple Watch only supports voice calls. If you receive a FaceTime call, the watch displays an option to hold the call until you get to your iPhone.