Pebble Activated … with even smarter notifications

pebble

My Pebble watch arrived last night and I immediately set it up as I’ve been waiting a long time for it to ship!  Out of the box, it required a quick firmware update which gets sent via your linked phone … in my case the Galaxy Note II.  Pretty straight forward stuff for anyone geeky enough to want a smart watch.

I turned on all the available notices which give you control / notice access to incoming calls, sms messages, calendar reminders, email notifications (exchange, gmail), google talk, google voice, facebook and whatsapp.  Not a bad start, though as noticed earlier in the day by a co-worker, the exchange notification is rather limited simply stating you’ve received a new message rather than offering some context via a subject and preview like Gmail.

A quick search revealed a few options to enhance things.  First, there’s a Tasker profile called Pebble Notifier for capturing notifications and customizing their appearance.   My experience with Tasker has been mixed as I don’t really have the patience to learn the wonky ui even though it’s a rather powerful system. Looking around a bit more I found exactly what I wanted in an app called Augmented Smartwatch Pro.  I believe this app was initially developed for the Sony Smartwatch, but as noted on the developer’s site, it actually can handle quite a few watches with Pebble being the latest and getting some great attention. It’s well worth the few bucks to enhance the watch.

In Augmented Smartwatch Pro, there are a ton of settings to tweak which are generally quite straight forward.  If you have root, you can install sqlite3 on your Android and enhance the Exchange visibility which I’ve done and it’s made the app worth the effort immediately.  Beyond that though I’ve added all the other apps I want to get since you can simply cherry pick from your apps list what you want pushed to the Pebble.  Any app!

This morning has been rather interesting as I’ve had the system working and am loving how infrequently I’ve had to turn the screen on to check the phone.  I may even switch the phone to silent soon to keep it all flowing on the Pebble.  In addition to the screen lighting up on notice, it vibrates quickly too so it’s unlikely you will miss anything happening. All in all, a solid addition to the gadget family.