Yesterday, AT&T started rolling out its much-anticipated Android 4.3 Jelly Bean update for the Samsung Galaxy S4, and also announced in a press release that an additional update will also be being pushed out to all Galaxy Gear devices, transporting compatibility for the S4, as well as a couple of new features, together with a mass of bug fixes and stability improvements.

Prior to the update, the Gear could only prompt the wearer when a notification was received from a third-party app, it couldn’t physically display the said notification. This meant that users had to take out their phone and manually open the notification, which completely invalidated the very positive advantage of having the notification sent to your wrist in the first place.

Thankfully, Samsung has heard our cries for help, and teamed up with AT&T to include a line of code in the update, which enables the ability for the Gear to receive “real notifications.” However, to enable these notifications, you’ll need to have the latest version of the Gear Manager app installed on your device, and go into settings and enable it manually.

As a result, notifications from third-party apps will now be pushed to the Gear without users having to install any type of sketchy software. Obviously, you still won’t be able to reply to notifications from the Gear, but you will have the facility to take action on favoured notifications. For example, deleting an e-mail, or sending a pre-determined response to a Whatsapp message.

• ViaEngadget