The Apple watch will let you listen to music on Bluetooth headphones, no iPhone needed

While the Apple Watch does not have a cell chip in it to make it entirely autonomous from your phone it can do a few things independently, and one of them is play music and beam it to bluetooth-enabled headphones.

Last night, Apple chief executive Tim Cook was a guest on Charlie Rose’s show, and he mentioned that:

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It requires an iPhone, because they’ve been designed to work together. However, if you go for a run, and you don’t want to carry your iPhone, music is also on your watch. So with a Bluetooth headset, you can run and listen to your music without your iPhone.

Given the watch’s tiny size, a cell chip and its drain on the also tiny battery is out of the question right. But playing music over Bluetooth is one, and the joggers (and gym nuts) of the world thank you for this, Apple. It’ll be a bit like when the small, clip-on iPod Shuffle came out, and we all clipped them to our t-shirts while working up a sweat.

But in all seriousness, the watch’s health-tracking capabilities will make it good fitness companion, so being able to leave the comparatively large iPhone behind — even pre-iPhone 6 — will make everyone’s shorts pockets that much lighter.

We’re still unsure about the watch’s battery life, it’s currently vaguely pegged at “one day” before you need to charge it, but Apple is also likely still optimizing it as it gears up for manufacturing and shipping, so who knows what it will be when we get it.

In case you need a refresher on the Apple Watch, check out our hands-on preview from Apple’s big event this past Tuesday:

(h/t to Gizmodo)