New to this whole smartwatch thing...

[danielson2047]

Beginner question here. The zen watch 2 and the pebble time are what I'm looking at now for my first smart watch. Question is, do all smart watches have a keyboard that you can reply to sms/hangouts/etc messages with? I hate using voice to text for anything more than setting a calendar event or asking the weather. A buddy of mine has a cheap o watch off of amazon and it does have a keyboard, so hoping this is standard. Thanks!

 

[Penguwin]

Beginner question here. The zen watch 2 and the pebble time are what I'm looking at now for my first smart watch. Question is, do all smart watches have a keyboard that you can reply to sms/hangouts/etc messages with? I hate using voice to text for anything more than setting a calendar event or asking the weather. A buddy of mine has a cheap o watch off of amazon and it does have a keyboard, so hoping this is standard. Thanks!

TL;DR... Neither have it at the moment, but it may be coming to the ZenWatch 2 in the future.

This is not really a standard thing... Pebble does not have a keyboard and has actually gone on record as to mentioning their dislike of keyboards on smartwatches. There are some pre-made "canned" replies you can choose from on Pebble, but otherwise your stuck with voice replies.

Android Wear (which is used by the ZenWatch 2) does not currently come with a keyboard standard out of the box. However, the next, upcoming version of Android Wear has been shown to include a keyboard... not sure when this will officially be released to the ZenWatch 2 tho.

There is the Minimuum keyboard, but it's not incredibly useful for much past testing at the moment. None the less, more info on it here...
http://minuum.com/minuum-on-smartwatch

http://support.minuum.com/knowledgebase