By integrating BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) into Android Wear, BlackBerry Ltd. is entering the smartwatch market. The announcement happened yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES), taking place in Las Vegas this week.

The integration will bring all of the BBM features straight to your wrist, including push notifications for new messages, the ability to read full messages and respond using Google Now and the ability to accept new BBM invites. There will also be a list of pre-determined responses that will allow you to quickly and easily send off a message when you are too busy to type out a personal one.

Herman Li, Senior Vice President of BBM Engineering and Product Management said, “The integration of BBM to support wearable technology is just one way we’re expanding the capabilities of our portfolio and delivering exciting options for customers to easily access BlackBerry’s cross-platform technologies.”

Although the wearable device market is still relatively small, this is due to change over the next few years. According to research firm Canalys, annual smartwatch shipments will increase to over 23 million units for 2015, and over 45 million by 2017.

At CES, BlackBerry also announced some of their BBM numbers for 2014. The messaging service now has 90 million active users, with 70 percent of these people using BBM on a daily basis. Users spend more than nine hours a week within the messaging app. However, this leaves them far behind other messaging services, like WhatsApp who just announced hitting the 700 million mark.

In their press release, BlackBerry have said that BBM for Android Wear “will be supported by a wide variety” of Android Wear watches. If you already have the messenger service installed on your smartphone, then the Android Wear features will automatically be available on the watch.

BBM support for Android Wear will become available in early 2015.

Image via Wikimedia Commons