Pebble Time with Michael
Just last week I took a 6-day trip to Atlanta with my wife. It was the first long “road trip” I’ve taken since receiving my Pebble Time. The trip was an invaluable opportunity for evaluating my smartwatch and finding out how well it could help in making such a trip more enjoyable.
We drove to Atlanta from our home in Huntington, WV. It took us a little over 8 hours to arrive at our hotel in Atlanta.
The drive to Atlanta really confirmed my initial impressions of the Nav Me app – this is absolutely my favorite Pebble Time application. It made the drive so much more pleasant for me and it simply couldn’t be easier to use. This app actually starts up by itself on my Pebble Time whenever I launch Google Maps, select a destination, and request driving directions to it. Its screen then automatically pops up on my Pebble Time with all the information I need to start traveling to my destination.
No more juggling my Samsung Galaxy phone on my lap trying to see where my next turn will be. The app buzzes before every turn and displays the distance to the next turn, brief textual information about that turn, an icon indicating turn direction, estimated arrival time, and the remaining distance to my final destination. Everything I need to know available to me from a brief glance at my watch. I find this application to be absolutely amazing!
Once we arrived at our hotel the next Pebble Time application that proved useful to me was TripAdvisor. One of the first things I did upon arriving was to use this app to check for available restaurants in the surrounding area. It responded quite quickly with such a list. Selecting a restaurant soon returned information on the establishment, including location and a TripAdvisor rating. I found this app to be very handy throughout our trip in helping find both restaurants and attractions to visit, no matter where we found ourselves in the Atlanta area.
Of course, while in Atlanta we were always interested in learning the day’s weather forecast each morning. The Weather app provided us with both daily forecasts and a 5-day forecast of the local weather. Although a little slower in operation than TripAdvisor, it still did the job required of it and gave us exactly the information we needed. Of course, my current favorite watch face, DIN Time, also provided us with the current temperature and weather conditions throughout each day.
Last, and certainly not least, were the invaluable notification functions that my Pebble Time provided me. We visited with quite a few friends while in Atlanta and whenever I received an SMS or Facebook Messenger message from any of them, my Pebble immediately made me aware of it. I also received notifications from items contained in my Timeline, giving me warnings of upcoming events that we were to attend during our trip. I was also quickly informed of the few important email messages I received during our trip, enabling me to immediately deal with them and to ignore all the non-vital emails until later.
I must say that I really love the way the Pebble Time works with Google’s Inbox. Inbox handles email prioritization really well. With it I am only notified of Important email messages – the arrival of Low Priority email messages never interrupts my activities.
In conclusion, my Pebble Time helped very efficiently guide me to Atlanta and provided me with very useful information once we arrived there. It served as an an invaluable personal assistant in helping manage my electronic communications throughout the trip. Thus, the Pebble Time has really proved its value to me during our journey to Atlanta.