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Smart Notifications with Two devices

Former Member over 7 years ago

Is it possible to get Smart Notifications with two devices?

I've had a Fenix 5 for the past year and it gets Smart Notifications successfully for calls and Android apps. This pas week I added a Vivoactive 3 to be my weekday watch (activity tracking, smaller, better looks), keeping the Fenix 5 for activities and workouts. The Vivoactive 3 is set to my preferred tracker.

The Fenix 5 is getting call and Smart Notifications. The Vivoactive 3 is not.

Is it only possible to have one device receive notifications? If so, how do you change which device gets the notifications?

The VA3 shows a phone connection. I've tried repairing it and re-adding it to GCM.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

I figured this out a few minutes after I posted this. It seems that you can only get notifications on the VA3 is you have the notifications widget installed. I uninstalled the notification widget because I'm not interested in past notifications. I assumed wrongly that seeing notifications as they happen on your watchface was a function of the base OS, not a widget.

0 ASmugDill over 7 years ago

The ‘toast’ notifications (along with tones and/or vibration set up for such) is most likely a capability on the wearable device's operating system, but the Notifications widget would be the viewer application for their content. If the user has deliberately disabled or removed the notifications viewer capability, then I guess it would make logical sense to assume the user does not want to read notifications at any point in time.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

I get that they might think that, but that's not how I use my watch. With the VA3 to a lesser extent because it's my daily watch, but especially with the Fenix 5 which I wear for activities, I want to get to the maximum information with the minimum motions. I like the momentary prompt of a notification that let's me know to go look at my phone to get more information if I want to, but I don't like scrolling through a bunch of screen to get information when I'm doing something like running or even kayaking. That's probably why I use all of the "Dozen Run", "Dozen Paddle", etc data fields. Higher information density. That's also why I replaced the steps, floors, and intensity minutes widgets with the third part Goal widget which shows all of the same information in one screen. The notification widget is just wasted space I need to scroll past. I'm not going to read emails or even texts on a 200x200 screen.

0 ASmugDill over 7 years ago

So don't read the content of the notifications (which never promised to contain all of the content of the corresponding incoming mail or SMS message anyway, since I think each notification will only contain up to 700 characters including sender, subject and all that) on your watch, but don't remove the widget from the watch either. You can place it as far away from the watchface in the loop as possible, as long as you're aware that total customisation to suit your ideal is not an option on offer.