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Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

Not the original poster but for me it means not having to look at my phone for many tasks. I can see who texted or messaged me and the message without opening my phone. I can take or ignore a call. Basically anything that hits your message alerts can be displayed on the watch in most cases.

Maybe the Apple Watch is not the best fitness tracker watch but it’s plenty good for me and it’s health integration is pretty good especially with the ultra.

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When setting up my Windows machine I was given the opportunity to pair it with my iPhone via Phone Link. In doing so, my Windows machine was able to get all of the notifications that I saw on the Lock Screen of my iPhone, and call history (make and receive calls too).

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev... and https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/04/26/phone...

I assume that this functionality is available to other devices too.

It’s a poor subset of the functionality available to the Apple Watch. One obvious example is that you can reply to a message on an Apple Watch, not so over the API Windows uses.

Here's a description of the functionality on Windows which includes replying to a message. https://youtu.be/M4ihxL7B2ug?t=157&si=AaA6wvzbTuIL3eOC

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2023/04/26/phone...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...

> Read and reply to messages with ease, make and receive calls, and manage your device’s notifications right on your PC (1) (2)

> 1 Messaging feature is limited by iOS. Image/video sharing and group messaging is not supported. Messages are session based and will only come through when phone is connected to PC.

> 2 Phone Link for iOS requires iPhone with iOS 14 or higher, Windows 11 device, Bluetooth connection and the latest version of the Phone Link app. Not available for iPad (iPadOS) or MacOS. Device compatibility may vary. Regional restrictions may apply. Trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Yep. That's exactly right.

When a phone call comes in, or I get a notification (text, calendar, app notification etc) - my Apple Watch does a really good job of (quite often) giving me enough info from my wrist that I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket.

Garmin watches have some of this integration (IIRC you can definitely get texts, I don't remember what else) - but certainly not all of it. I haven't tried smartwatches from other manufacturers.

Does a Garmin watch not do that? I often see people looking at notifications on their non-Apple watch.

I can do all of that with my Garmin watch though?

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