Good point about the Apple Watch being the truly minimal "phone."
I also very frequently now leave my iPhone at home. This takes a little planning in the form of having an audio book and a few podcasts on the watch.
Apple Watch + AirPods makes me feel set free when I am hiking or out of the house with family and friends. It is so easy to ignore the light vibration notification for incoming text messages or emails, and easy to ignore calls.
Minor clarification: GPS is always included. Only cellular is optional. I know what you mean, but your wording makes it sound as if GPS was a paid feature.
Yes, but streaming over cellular is mostly limited to support from Apple apps, not third party apps. Spotify might be the kind exception for that right now.
The API was added last year to allow third parties to stream and a Siri intent was added for third party music apps to work as well as Apple Music. After years of whining, Spotify took (has taken?) forever taking advantage of it.
It's just streaming from the phone though, not actually over cell? I know they don't have offline, which is the main reason I've held off buying a watch and airpods for running: I only need a few hours of music, GPS, and HR, and it feels like this should be a good combo.
Apple Music could stream over cellular over the watch when the first Apple Watch with cellular was introduced. They added support for third parties last year.
Apple Music and maybe Spotify will work off line. The cellular Apple Watch has 16GB of storage.
I also very frequently now leave my iPhone at home. This takes a little planning in the form of having an audio book and a few podcasts on the watch.
Apple Watch + AirPods makes me feel set free when I am hiking or out of the house with family and friends. It is so easy to ignore the light vibration notification for incoming text messages or emails, and easy to ignore calls.