Cellular Continuity in iOS 9 Enables Phone Calls on iPad and Mac Even When Your iPhone is Off

At its worldwide developer conference earlier this month, Apple announced iOS 9. The latest iteration to its mobile operating system, which will be rolling out to all the iOS 8 supported device later this year, comes with a handful of new features including substantial improvements to Siri, as well as the much awaited support for multi-window Split View. But it also packs in a number of other handy features that Apple didn’t showcase at the event itself.

One such feature is the ability to use Continuity over the cellular network. Continuity, as you may remember, is a feature that Apple introduced with iOS 8 last year. Continuity makes it possible for OS X Yosemite-powered devices to interact with iOS 8-powered iPhones and iPads to do a number of things together. For instance, it lets you take phone calls right from the computer or iPad. Similarly, one could also send messages from a Mac, instead of having to deal with the pain of walking to the next room to get your iPhone.
But until now, this feature only worked when all of these devices are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. So, for example, if your iPhone is using cellular connectivity for data usage, Connectivity wouldn’t work on you device. But Apple is changing that with iOS 9. You could now have your computer, iPhone, and iPad connected to different networks — which might as well be cellular networks — and as long as the mobile devices are running on iOS 9 (or its beta), you can make use of the feature.

But that’s not all. As folks at iDownloadBlog note, Continuity works even when your iPhone is switched off. Thanks to which, now you can take phone calls even when your iPhone’s battery is dead. Though, you still need to make sure that all of the participating devices are signed in with the same iCloud account. You will also need to enable corresponding settings to make it possible.
In the US, you will be able to forward your calls to any valid iCloud device if you’re on T-Mobile network. Other network providers will hopefully also roll out this feature at some point. It will be interesting to see how the connectivity feature fares on cellular networks elsewhere. Technically, it should be able to that.