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Comment by dstaley | Hacker News Reader

I loved my Pebble, but Android Wear offers such a superior experience when it comes to notification management. The only thing I use my watch for is processing incoming notifications (such as liking a tweet, archiving an email, replying to a Slack message, etc.) The 4.0 release notes hint at the power of the Android notification system, and it baffles me that Pebble still doesnt fully integrate with it.

I'm afraid that Android Wear watches will improve on the battery life and outdoor visibility front faster than Pebble will improve on the software front.

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Have you given "Notification Center for Pebble" a try? It bypasses Pebble's native notification system by using a custom watchapp and a phone companion app. Compared to Pebble's native notification system, Notification Centre has a ton of different customisation settings globally and/or per app (e.g. font, text size, vibration patterns) and also supports Android Wear actions on notifications.

I'd still prefer an Android Wear watch so I can do this natively, but until one comes out with a decent battery life and at a reasonable price point, this works for now.

I highly doubt Android Wear will improve on battery life to compete with the Pebbles short of a huge scientific breakthrough.

A full charge of the Pebble Time lasted me 5-6 days.

They can increase battery life by making the watch bigger and heavier. Don't laugh -- okay, do laugh, but it's surprising what people will put up with. We used to think that 6" phones were ridiculous.

Some of us still do!

It's ridiculous because they were making them thinner too.

Absolutely right.

There is no way that a Cortex-A series processor will be as efficient as the Cortex-M's microcontrollers that are being used by the Pebbles.

There is also nothing that needs the power of the Cortex-A's either, the M series are perfectly capable of doing everything a watch needs to.

Yeah, on the Pebble Time Steel it lasts me 7-8 days. Before I activated health activity tracking, I'd get to the order of 9-10 days on average. I find this highly impressive.

Pebble can do all the notification actions (replying to slack, archiving an email, etc) that you mentioned! Any action that shows up in the notification shade on Android gets sent to Pebble. Using canned messages or the microphone to respond. We added support for all 'Wear' type actions late in 2015. Are there specific actions that you feel are missing on Android?

What does Android Wear add? I've only got experience with a Pebble.

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