It took almost a year from when it was initially predicted, and was with a different backbone carrier, and was slightly more expensive than promised, but at long last the deal is done: US Mobile now offers Apple Watch support if you are on their Warp (read: VZW) network, for the sum of $6.50 a month on top of your existing plan. Which in my case is $10 a month (could drop to $8 if I were willing to pay for a year up front) and means a total outlay of $16.50, which is to say, half the cost of porting out to Verizon’s own Visible MVNO which I was previously testing.
So now we’ll see. This actually has my alternate number, and when I go out I will still get all my normal notifications if I leave my phone on at home. I have found tools to let me easily stream radio over it if I want, and I have the drivers license on there (if only it were accepted other than at certain airports and SoCal bars), and honestly, for personal use, the only thing it really lacks for my purposes is Signal. But to the point – this is now fully capable of being my shutdown night phone, the only thing I leave the house with walking down to the local for a couple of pints on a Sunday night or for a walk at lunchtime or a quick trip to the gym. Every fallback phone I’ve tried to revert to in the last 10 years has now been replaced by a thing on my arm.
And that is the real magic, honestly. This is not just a phone, this is basically everything I ever carried in DC strapped to my arm with nothing else required. Hell, even more – Maps, Citymapper, vitals tracking, more than just calls and texts and email and music playback. I can do song recognition, bank balance lookups, package tracking, simple Wikipedia lookups, even language translation for all the major languages used in the Bay Area. Plus, of course, Walkie-Talkie – the Dick Tracy vision come to life.
Thirty years ago, when I got that DewBeep pager for $10 and 10 Mountain Dew labels, I looked at the little black plastic box with the Motorola logo and wondered if you could ever have some sort of Mac accessory like that. And now, it reposes on my left wrist. One more thin but satisfying slice of the promised future, for as long as the future lasts.
Of which.