Thanks to Pebble’s new app update, users with Galaxy, Nexus and other Android devices can have all their phone notifications channeled to their arms.
Previously, Pebble only displayed a select group of Android alerts, like built-in services (think texts, appointments and Gmail) or some third-party apps designed to work with the watch. Now, if you have Android 4.3 or later, the new Pebble firmware version 2.8 can funnel all of your phone notifications to your arm, and without workarounds.
The reality of incessant wrist-numbing vibrations may be more than some folks bargain for. On iOS, Pebble ties into the iPhone’s Notifications Center, which means users can’t change what shows up on the watch without changing the fundamental alerts of the phone itself. The new Android app, however, includes controls for fine-tuning.
Under Notifications > All Apps, you can choose to pipe in all your notifications or control which notifications you want. Eventually, the company promises older versions of Android will get support as well.
Additionally, users can now end calls in progress from the wrist, and Pebble completely rewrote its Android app to offer faster, more stable performance, it says. For now, the changes will apply to 10 percent of Pebble Android users, but the company promises more will be able to benefit from it over the coming weeks.
The new firmware isn’t limited to just Android devices, though for iPhone users, it’s more of an incremental update. iPhones have a new ability to shut off “Smartwatch Proximity,” the low energy Bluetooth feature that lets the watch and phone sense when they’re near each other.
Both apps offer expanded language support, with full character support for 80 languages, including Catalan, German, Norwegian Bokmål, Danish, Lithuanian, Portuguese and Swedish.
Screen capture courtesy of Pebble; all other photos by Adriana Lee for ReadWrite
