Smart Watch and Lumia 1520 - a no-brainer?

[leo74]

Let's face it: the L1520 is a huge phone.
While I cannot wait to get it delivered, it also made me think about the way I will use it on a daily basis.
I will mostly carry it in the pocket of my jacket and I pretty much expect to use a Bluetooth headset to make and answer phone calls. I am not sure if I want to hold that massive thing to my ear

But wouldn't it be great to be able to only pull the phone out when you really need/want to?
Wouldn't it be just awesome to use a smart watch to quickly check who calls, read a text or check a notification?

For my part the 1520 is the absolute IDEAL device to be joined by a smart watch.
Unfortunately, beside a few rumors there doesn't seem to be anything on the horizon from Nokia.

What are your thoughts?
Do you think Nokia should have brought a smart watch with the L1520?
Should they bring one very soon?
Do you have your eyes on any other smart watch?
Is a smart watch a waste of money altogether?
What do you think?

 

[TenTwelve]

If I was going to go the smart watch route I'd go with a Kreyos Meteor.

 

[leo74]

I looked at it and also the Agent watch.. I am not sure which route I will take yet. Overall I think Nokia missed out a bit by not bringing one with the L1520. The phone itself would make a nice use case for the watch.

 

[Indistinguishable]

I agree that the Bluetooth headset and Lumia 1520 combination is a no brainer. I think that smart watches serve the same purpose regardless of the size of the phone -> Look stupid.

 

[whtchdr]

The Qualcomm Toq watch is supposed to work with Windows Phone and comes out early December as well.

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk

 

[leo74]

The Qualcomm Toq watch is supposed to work with Windows Phone and comes out early December as well.

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk

Their webpage only states Android, but one can hope that WP might come down the road... The watch looks OK overall. Not sure if I like the wristband though, that looks a bit cheap...

 

[NFLPLAYBOOK]

I'm glad to see that there is at least a couple of options that will be available. Nokia or Microsoft should have launched their own though. I will be getting one of them. I love the idea of controlling the phone without taking it out of your pocket. There are times when I simple can't or don't want to.

 

[mooks7232]

There should be more options that will be available. I will be getting one of them. I love the idea of controlling the phone without taking it out of your pocket.
The Qualcomm Toq watch is supposed to work with Windows Photo , I have used this kind of smart watch , it's not bad, I watch the compare,
the top best smart watch this year
the sony smart watch2 has beautiful apperance, but pebble is better used with iphone I think, samsang galaxy is cool worked with android.

 

[kougei]

I agree 100% with the OP, echoes my own thoughts exactly.

Based on current/looming tech, I am considering the Nokia BH-907 Reactive headset and the Agentwatch alongside.

It's not co-incidence that Samsung offer bundles of the Galaxy Gear with the Galaxy Note.

 

[leo74]

I like the Agent watch myself. Haven't heard of the headset yet but I will check it out.

 

[badplanet]

I have been working on a WP8 app to use with the Pebble watch. One of the limitations of watches with WP8 is that there currently is no way to intercept most notifications and send them on to the watch. There is an API to intercept SMS messages but not for 3rd party apps. Incoming phone calls can be intercepted with Bluetooth HFP profile but the watch needs to explicitly support that. There is no API to intercept incoming phone calls on the phone.

I wrote the first and currently only WP8 app to use with the Pebble watch called "Pebble Watch Lite" in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Currently it can be used to control the music on WP8 (pause/play, next, prev song) and send all kinds of sample notifications to the Pebble watch. I have a more full featured app coming that will display Calendar, Twitter and Facebook alerts on the Pebble watch. I intend to add more features but the limitations of WP8 are huge.

I have also ordered the Agent and Kreyos watches and want to know how they will work with WP8 to overcome some of the challenges. I just fear that WP8 will not get updated notifications until WP8.1 blue and even then I am not sure what features MS will make available to 3rd party devs.

 

[leo74]

I have been working on a WP8 app to use with the Pebble watch. One of the limitations of watches with WP8 is that there currently is no way to intercept most notifications and send them on to the watch. There is an API to intercept SMS messages but not for 3rd party apps. Incoming phone calls can be intercepted with Bluetooth HFP profile but the watch needs to explicitly support that. There is no API to intercept incoming phone calls on the phone.

I wrote the first and currently only WP8 app to use with the Pebble watch called "Pebble Watch Lite" in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Currently it can be used to control the music on WP8 (pause/play, next, prev song) and send all kinds of sample notifications to the Pebble watch. I have a more full featured app coming that will display Calendar, Twitter and Facebook alerts on the Pebble watch. I intend to add more features but the limitations of WP8 are huge.

I have also ordered the Agent and Kreyos watches and want to know how they will work with WP8 to overcome some of the challenges. I just fear that WP8 will not get updated notifications until WP8.1 blue and even then I am not sure what features MS will make available to 3rd party devs.

Always great to have a developer chiming in! Please keep us posted on your efforts on the smart watch front... I had no idea that the Pebble watch would possibly work on WP.

 

[krisguy]

Right now, WP8 doesn't allow the access that smart watches need.

Sent from my Nokia Lumia 1520 using Tapatalk

 

[bjerry101]

I'm actually waiting on my Kreyos watch... they were suppose to start shipping on Nov but got pushed to Jan.

 

[xyronaut]

I just stumbled upon that unofficial pebble app does exist at WP store:
http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=89c8bd16-dea0-4095-8683-2bf20c30e8c1

I also read in several tech news sites about it few days ago. Surprisingly there's nothing in WPcentral.

I'm looking forward WPcentral would do some video reviews on this app with actual pebble watch. I'm curious about the notification syncronisation works on WP.

 

[jaj324]

I'm not looking for a way or reason NOT to use my 1520. Why buy the newest smartphone available and then spend more money on a smartwatch in an effort to use it less. If I didn't want to use the phone I wouldn't have bought it in the first place.

Nokia 1520

 

[badplanet]

I just stumbled upon that unofficial pebble app does exist at WP store:
Pebble Watch Pro | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)

I also read in several tech news sites about it few days ago. Surprisingly there's nothing in WPcentral.

I'm looking forward WPcentral would do some video reviews on this app with actual pebble watch. I'm curious about the notification syncronisation works on WP.

I wrote both the free Pebble Watch Lite app and the Pebble Watch Pro app ($1.99). The Pebble Watch Pro app currently offers 4 notifications. Calendar notifications, Twitter notifications (both home timeline and direct messages), phone battery notifications and network notifications. I am working on additional notifications such as Facebook.

WP8 still has some crippling limitations though. The application cannot run in the background which means that if it is not the active app you get no notifications. For me this is not a terrible limitation because I just switch to the app when I am not actively using my phone. That way I get notifications while I am working, driving or doing anything else.

The other limitation is that apps are sandboxed and do not have access to incoming phone call, SMS texts or emails. I'm hoping this will change when the WP8.1 blue update comes out.

I can tell you that comments from app purchaser's are pretty brutal with many 1 star ratings as they cannot understand why these features are not there like they are with the iOS and Android apps.

 

[manicottiK]

I can tell you that comments from app purchaser's are pretty brutal with many 1 star ratings as they cannot understand why these features are not there like they are with the iOS and Android apps.

Remember, as the developer, you are responsible for all OS limitations, non-implementation of features the user wants, and all bad feelings and memories of the user. :wink:

I do wish that Microsoft would provide some mechanism for developers to contact users (like Google now does) or for other users to rate reviews as helpful or not (as Amazon does). Having ones own app get a 1-star review when it does what it's supposed to, but not what a user expected or hoped it to, is disheartening.

Given no facility from Microsoft to contact users, when one of my apps gets an off-base review, I compute the current average rating, then make a review of my own using that average (so as not to upset the rating too much) and address the text of the review to the bad review. Since recent reviews sort to the top, my comment is generally seen. I don't expect the 1-star reviewers to come back, but I do hope that subsequent users will get a better idea of what's going on. Since each person can only have one review, as the developer, I can only address the most recent off-base rating.

(I should emphasize that I don't do this for bad reviews which are deserved or with which I disagree. It's only for things that make no sense, like complaining that Word is a terrible stopwatch app or that Facebook can't upload photos to my file server at work.)

 

[badplanet]

Thanks manicottiK! I appreciate hearing from someone who can see things from the developers side. I think if users knew the full story about why an app has certain limitations they might not be so harsh. (So you are saying that after all the money I spent for MS Office now I need to buy a stopwatch!)

 

[manicottiK]

It's easier to sympathize when one's been a "victim" of the same kind of review madness.

Our main app has a great set of ratings and reviews -- 46 5-star and 26 4-star -- but then there are some odd outliers that don't seem related to the app. There's one 1-star review ("Weak") and a 3-star ("Where is personal profile?"). "Weak" doesn't help at all and "personal profile" is baffling because we have no idea what it's supposed to mean. (Why not write "where is food processor?" or "where is my missing sock?")

What's a dev to do except learn to stop taking these ratings personally or focusing on the individual reviews rather than the general consensus. Someday, I'll be that more laid back guy, for now, I'm try to write a non-weak personal profile page...
:wink: