Owners of the Google Pixel smartwatch can now download the April 2024 update and get some new features in addition to the usual security updates. The most important feature is “Smartwatch with vibration,” a new sub-category in the vibration settings that allows displaying the time as a vibration with a tap.
Short and long vibes for the right time
The menu itself is not new. I was able to find it on my second-generation Pixel Watch after purchase, but the functions listed in it had no effect until receiving the update. Now the vibration mode can finally be activated, even if the purpose of the current implementation is rather questionable. It is only possible to tell the time by vibration when the display is on, at a point where you have already noticed the time on the display much faster with your eyes or ears.
By default, the vibration is in a basic digit system. A long vibration stands for tens, short vibrations for single digits. A single tap with two fingers gives the hours, a double tap with two fingers the minutes respectively. It sounds complicated at first, but it’s actually easy to learn.
Let’s say it’s 12 hours and 8 minutes. The watch would vibrate once long and twice short for the hour (10 hours + 2 hours = 12 hours). Since the minutes have not yet reached 10, the watch would vibrate eight times briefly at the double tap gesture. If the minutes had already reached 28, the watch would first vibrate twice long and then eight times short. If you still find this system too complicated or lengthy, you can either increase the vibration speed or switch to a simple system in which the minutes are rounded down to the previous quarter of an hour. One short vibration represents a quarter of an hour. Thus, the first minute vibration occurs at 15 minutes past the hour. Of course, this is only for people who don’t care about the exact minute.
Well meant, badly done?
As already mentioned, the vibration can only be triggered when the watch display is activated. Even if the always-on display is active (Not available when TalkBack is activated), the vibration function cannot be used. You have to wonder what the point of this feature is. When you turn on the display, the time is displayed or spoken anyway. This is usually much faster than even the fastest vibration setting. Maybe deafblind people would still benefit from this. On the other hand, the smartwatch as a whole is probably not yet suitable for this target group. One conceivable use scenario, especially for the blind, could be a noisy street where the voice output would simply be too quiet to be understood. However, the vibration would be much more useful when the display is turned off, to check the time inconspicuously during meetings or in other quiet environments. Google should definitely make improvements here, otherwise this feature will be nothing more than a nice toy to drain the battery a little faster.
I had this exact same thought about the feature on my Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. Nice idea, bad implementation. Though to be fair, I believe it works the same on an Apple Watch. While on that platform I could also never get the time vibrations to work with screen off. What I can say is that I can turn TalkBack volume down as far as it will go, and it’s a slightly more discrete way to check the time when you don’t want everyone hearing and thus knowing you are checking the time.