Messaging on the Pebble Time (Hangouts, Yo and Awear)

Messaging on a smartwatch, specifically the Pebble Time, gets old real fast. You can’t really have a keyboard on the Pebble Time (and I really don’t want one), so composing messages on your wrist isn’t really easy…unless one of the three following requirements are fulfilled: 1) you can do it with your voice, 2) there’s only one specific word you’d like to text, 3) you can creat (not just reply!) messaged with predefined contents. I’m using different apps for each one of those scenarios, which sounds way more complicated than it actually is.

Voice replies for Google Hangouts

I’m probably one of the few people who actually persuaded most his friends to use Hangouts for instant messaging. Why? I’m quite invested in the Google ecosystem and love the convenience of being able to write messages from any device that I use – now including my Pebble Time! Unfortunately, Pebble Time doesn’t support voice replies for Hangouts out of the box. Some people have told me their PT gave them instructions what’s necessary in order to be able to do so – well, mine didn’t. Here are instructions on how you can make sure that voice replies for Hangouts will work on your Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel:

After receiving a Hangouts message, hit the Select button and choose “reply”. The watch will prompt you with the following message: “To enable Hangouts replies, install Android Wear”.

Yea, what are you waiting for? You can find Android Wear on the Google Play Store. Keep the prompt on your watch open while doing this. As soon as you’ve installed the Android Wear app on your phone, Pebble Time should automagically give you this message: “You can now reply to Hangouts!”. Give it a try – I was surprised how often I actually use this feature…all the Time.

Yo

There’s no need to explain the sense of this app or the lack thereof…you either get it, or you don’t. For me, it took a while…but now I quite like it on my Pebble Time. Reminiscent of those days when I would quickly wring my buddy’s phone and hang up again while waiting outside his door…I can now simply “Yo” him. At the very least it the nerd’s version of sending your heartbeat to someone else’s wrist…now idea who would want to do that.

When trying to set up yo, don’t forget to login on the companion app on your phone and to hit “SUBMIT” after logging in! Your Yo contact list will then appear on your Pebble Time.

 Awear

While Hangouts and the other messaging apps only allow you to reply to messages, you can actually compose messages with Awear for your favorite contacts. It gives you a decent selection of predefined messages in various folders, or you can set up specific ones that you need most often. All this can be configured in the companion app, that you need to download from Google Play.

Awear isn’t only an app that you can launch on your Pebble Time, but it’s also a watchface! However, if you choose to use it as your standard watchface, you won’t be able to access the timeline anymore – which is why I’ve deactivated it as watchface. This might chance once the developers have optimized the app for Timeline UI. Now the Awear interface only shows up when I launch the app manually or when I have a new message. For this purpose, I recommend setting it up as Quick Launch for the Up- or Down-button. Awear lets you choose what you want to have displayed – SMS, Hangouts, E-Mails, Calendar…the list is quite extensive. You can also set up different vibration patterns for various app notifications!

What apps do you guys use for messaging? Or do you think messaging on the Pebble Time is stupid anyway?