Gadgetory

to date pebble has remained pretty limited in functionality but that's soon gonna change I'm Taylor Martin this is PocketNow and this is a hands-on with the pebble app store while pebble is currently the front-runner in the wearable category many feel the SmartWatch has lacked in certain areas officially until now pebble has done little more than deliver notifications to your wrist and tell time some third-party developers got clever and found different ways to bring more functionality to the SmartWatch but discovering those apps and sometimes getting them up and running was a bit tricky however for the next major OS update pebble 2.0 pebble aims to change that with the pebble app store a centralized location where you can find watch faces and watch apps alike we've already spent some time using the latest pebble tirado betas and showed you some of our favorite 2.0 watch apps for android last week but this time it's official and it doesn't require searching the web high and low for compelling applications for pebble first know that this is not final software it's a pre-release version of the App Store as well as beta software on the pebble also note that this pebble app store preview is only available for iOS at the moment but we're told the App Store for Android will be available very soon now that that's out of the way what can you expect from the new App Store well we've got a few minutes of hands-on time at CES for a pebble CEO Erik Menshikov ski showed off some of the cool new features including partner applications Yelp Foursquare ESPN and GoPro let's take a second to look at some of those in more detail with the El you can get restaurant reviews straight on your wrist as well as the ability to discover nearby nightlife coffee shops mechanics drug stores and shopping spots if you have the discover mode enabled while within the up app a flick of the wrist will pull a random nearby location whereby you can then get more information such as reviews the address or contact number the ESPN app also puts need-to-know information straight on your wrist you can get live scores straight on your pebble pressing the up and down button scrolls through current and upcoming games and pressing the select button in the middle takes you to settings where you can then choose your league set the Refresh interval and invert the colors of the app and Foursquare makes checking in incredibly easy using your phone's GPS signal checking in is as simple as opening the Foursquare app on pebble scrolling up and down to find your location and hitting the select button in the middle but where the real magic happens is within the new pebble app store there are three sections my pebble get watch faces and get apps under get watch faces all compatible watch faces are available divided into three sections all most-loved and pebble picks tap on a watch face to open its page and click Add to install the app section is understandably a little more detailed and categorized daily tools and utilities notifications remotes Fitness and games are the six main categories and their featured in four different sections all most loved weekly top picks and pebble essentials you'll find apps that do everything from remote camera controls for your iPhone to sleep monitors and games there are currently twenty games ranging from brain twisters like Sudoku and chess to more casual stuff like asteroids you can choose up to eight watch faces and apps in total on pebble and once the pebble is full additional watch faces and apps will be stored in your pebble Locker pebble locker and installed watch faces and apps are managed in the my pebble menu you can scroll left and right to get a visual preview of all the installed watch faces and apps on your pebble as well as the apps in your locker tap one to bring up a pop-up window from there you can load unload or delete the watch face or app and if there are configuration settings a configuration button will be available in the pop-up or beneath the selected watch face or app some examples of configurable watch faces are modern one of our favorites we covered last week pebble Mars a live updating feed of pictures from the Mars Curiosity rover and studio cloth within modern for example you can invert colors turn off the second hand to preserve precious battery and customize the date and weather appearance so far the pebble app store has nearly 1,000 apps available with over 6,000 registered developers all of those applications at least in the pebble app store are currently free however developers can require a paid companion application on Google Play or App Store thanks to the pebble app store that may be something we see more of in the not-too-distant future but if it brings more functionality to our wrists we won't complain after just a short while with the AppStore installed the usability and functionality of our pebble has increased significantly along with the user experience it feels more complete and truly streamlines the process of finding watch faces and apps not to mention the locker has helped offset the small amount of storage which limits the number of applications which can be installed at once by adding the ability to quickly swap out commonly used applications we're definitely excited to see what new capabilities this will bring to pebble that's gonna do it for this video if you enjoyed it be sure to click the thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel to see more videos like this one follow us on all the usual places twitter facebook and google+ at pocket now I'm Taylor Martin you can find me on twitter at casper tech and now i will see you next time