Gadgetory

here at pocket now we all know that wearables are the next big thing pebble is great and the Galaxy gear is a SmartWatch that does well quite a bit more unfortunately it only works on select Samsung devices I'm Joe Levi for PocketNow and this is how to get your Galaxy gear to work with your Nexus 5 this is my Nexus 5 it's rooted but yours shouldn't have to be now this hack came out a little while ago and you might be asking why are we only covering it now well the reason being there was an update to one of the files bringing it up to version 1.6 we're hoping that will help us with some of the problems that we had when we tried to do it before so hat tip to Michael Fisher for trying it out this new version just came out yesterday let's give it a shot so the first thing you're gonna need to do is download some files I've already got those downloaded and we'll have links to those and exactly what you're going to need in the article over at PocketNow so make sure you head over there to get the stuff that you need next you're gonna need a file explorer i've got root explorer you can use pretty much anything you want it does need the ability to extract a zip files or apks to zip so keep that in mind let's go ahead and open this up now this is all in my downloads folder and the first thing that we're gonna do is come in here and install one of these apps so this file gr gear manager stub is the first file that you're gonna want to install simply tap on that choose install of course you've got to be able to install from unknown or untrusted sources which you can do quickly and easily through your your settings up in their apps installed that parts done this is where it gets a little bit tricky the next file that we're going to do is this gear manager and this is version 1.6 point a whole bunch of other numbers after it 1.3 blah blah blah we can't just install it at least not yet what we've got to do is extract that the way we're going to do that is simply to long press on this and we are going to rename it and we're not going to do anything particularly fancy we're just going to take the a PK and I'm not even going to take that off I'm just going to add a dot zip say okay and you can see now it's changed it into a zip file and a BK is just a specially organized zip file so this isn't doing anything weird it's just changing the handler from the Installer to something that will help you strike it files let's go ahead and open that up and you can see we've got a whole bunch of other files in here from here open the assets folder and we want to open the preinstalled apks notice none of these are pre-installed because well we haven't pre-installed them yet we want to install all of those except for music and weather and there are a bunch of them so I'm gonna go ahead and do this and you don't have to watch me do it you know how to install an apk just install them all and then we can go on to the next step we've got ahead and extract of this and then of course installed the APK is the two that don't install our music and whether they'll throw an error so if you want to just install everything just know that you're going to get problems installing those and that's just fine the next step is to come back in here rename this back from a zip to an APK I'm just gonna slide over and do that delete done okay and now we're right back there it's an apk now we're going to install this since those assets have already been pre-installed next we want to connect our galaxy gear to the gear manager you'll want to make sure that you have your Galaxy gear turned on it's got this a nice little video that it plays showing you just how to do it make sure that's turned on or it's not gonna work if you want to pair it manually you can do that as well we're gonna go ahead and check and say pair and we're making a little bit more progress through the manual setup than we did through the automatic NFC setup and use your license agreement sure we'll say yes and next that I scroll to the bottom apparently well we've got to acknowledge and read carefully and acknowledge and now we can next there we our Galaxy gear is set up at this point it's going to show us what we can do so this is now all just the regular gear stuff that you would expect to be be able to be used with your brand new Galaxy gear but again working on the Nexus 5 next in gear manager we want to go down to settings and in settings we want to allow unknown sources so we can install apps that aren't Samsung approved onto our gear now the reason for that if we come back over here we want to install etienne manager the latest version is 1.2.3 go ahead and tap on that and we'll go ahead and scroll down and say install now this is a notification manager it's not all that pretty but you are gonna be able to get the notifications over to your gear that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do so once you're inside etienne manager simply select what things that you want to be able to get notifications for so that's how to get your Galaxy gear working with your Nexus 5 now this works okay on the Nexus 5 but there hasn't been much success with any other devices out there if you have another Android powered device and you want to give it a try you're definitely welcome to do so the instructions and the links to the files that you need are going to be in the article over at pocketnow.com and of course we want to know your success your challenges and even your failure in the comments down below let us know if it worked for you or not if you liked what you saw here go ahead and throw the video a thumbs up and of course if you haven't subscribed yet you'll want to make sure that you do so it's the best way that you can keep up to date with everything that's happening in the mobile arena if you want to follow us on social networks my favorite is Twitter where we are at pocket now and I am at Joe Levi thanks very much for watching we'll see you next time