Moto 360 smartwatch review

The Motorola Moto 360, alongside the Apple Watch, the Samsung Gear S and the LG G Watch R has ushered in a new world of connectivity.
 

Motorola Moto 360: Design and build

This is certainly an area that Moto has thought a lot about, given the attention to detail and the premium styling of everything from the box (a circular, almost hermetically sealed vault) through to the strap and buckle.

So, for the record, we're talking – stainless steel buckle and watch case, gorilla glass screen with a mirrored plastic back. Instead of a winder/crown there's a pushbutton that is low profile enough to not gouge into your wrist. We tested the black version, which teams black stainless parts with a black leather watchstrap. There's also a brushed steel and grey strap version, which might be more sartorially flexible.

Unboxing the Moto 360 reveals a micro USB adaptor and matchbox-sized Qi wireless stand, so you can use a travel charger if you wish. You can also use any other Qi compatible charger, both neat tricks. On startup a setup wizard on the watch tells you to download Android Wear, then a combo of the two talks you through setup, Bluetooth syncing and how to swipe through the screens. Then you're off. 

At 43mm across and 11mm deep, it's not the most massive watch one can buy, but it's far from understated. All in black it's quite noticeable on the wrist, and the slim strap at 20mm wide only accentuates it's girth.

That said, it's a premium enough package to justify the price, and if you made the screen smaller that'd create another range of problems.

Motorola Moto 360: Screen

The gorilla glass-fronted LCD screen has a resolution of 320 x 290 and is 1.5in in diameter. At normal watch distance the resolution is fine, but if you peer too closely you can tell the resolution ain't up to the best phones. Still, it's adequate, and gives us all something to look forward to in the Moto 360 two. Clearly having a higher res screen would have an effect on battery life, which is already under serious pressure.

Another detail you’ll notice is a small dead area at the base of the screen, a conscious design trade-off which gave Motorola somewhere to put daylight sensors. Without this the bezel would have been deeper. It’s a good trade, we think.

Motorola Moto 360: Battery

The big one, this. Moto themselves simply went with a 'lasts all day' claim rather than getting bogged down in the details, and at first touch that claim is pretty much accurate. Sometimes it's only just making it through (down to 25%, but it's thereabouts. That’s with all alerts on and synced to a busy inbox and multiple social channels. Clearly the 320mAh battery will age, but from new we’re pretty impressed – obviously you’ll need to charge everynight, and Moto have clearly anticipated this by adding a bedside clock- style function to the charger. When wirelessly docked, the display flips sideways and shows a calming blue clock, which may prove still too bright at night for some, but it’s not an unpleasant effect.

Motorola Moto 360: Chipset

The biggest bad news lurks here, with Motorola delivering a four year old TI OMAP 3 chip (OMAP3630) in the Moto 360, rather than the Snapdragon 400 gracing the Samsung and LG. This is responsible for the occasional lag and jitter while swiping around, and more than likely isn’t helping the battery life.

Motorola Moto 360: What is it like?

Well, it's very much like Android Wear and Google Cards smashed up in a box on your wrist. It's occasionally brilliant, like mirroring media controls automatically when listening to Spotify, or navigating using Google maps and getting vibrate alerts when a direction change is required. It's occasionally random too, demanding you look at the days weather again, and endlessly pointing out how many steps you've done. Using Runkeeper via your wrist is surprisingly compelling, albeit confusing if you try stacking Google Maps navigation and music on top of it. Overall it’s a slightly confusing experience, as Google tries to predict the information card you’re likely to want next, with varying success. However, finding the info you do want requires swiping away till you get to it. This is very much software rather than hardware though, and will undoubtedly improve.

The biggest disappointment comes from trying to activate apps from the watch. All too often Moto has decreed that the experience will be so awful that you simply run into an ‘Open on phone’ icon. This is understandable, but does consistently remind you of how limited smartwatch functionality currently is. Google voice search is as accurate as ever (about 80%) but often performs web searches for apps rather than opening them.    

The HR monitor does what it says on the tin, with the usual caveat that you need to position it away from the bone in your wrist, and the step counter is as reliable as any wrist-mounted pedometer bands. In fact, given you can easily spend £100-£150 on a fitness band, the Moto 360 looks pretty good value.

Sadly the leather strap isn’t ideal for getting all sweaty over, but it’s held in by standard watch pins, and finding alternative 20mm watch bands on the internet/any watch shop isn’t very hard.

Motorola Moto 360: Verdict

We were surprised how useful the Moto 360 was in everyday use, and we didn’t encounter any of the battery issues that others have reported, getting a full 7am till 11pm day with charge to spare. Wrist alerts are weirdly compelling, as is the fitness aspect of the Moto 360 (strap excepted). Google Wear is clearly still in its infancy and Motorola’s open source policy here has left the ball very much in Google’s court. Until the Apple Watch lands in early 2015, this is the smartwatch to beat.

Motorola Moto 360: Specs

Screen size: 1.5-inch, Gorilla Glass 3

Resolution: 320x290 pixels

Processor: TI OMAP 3

Features: Bluetooth 4.0, dual mics, vibration motor

Battery: 320mAh (one day)

Software: Android Wear

Weight: 49g (leather strap model)

Memory: 4GB internal storage + 512MB RAM

Water Resistance: IP 67

Dimensions: 46mm x 11.5mm

Sensors: Pedometer, Optical heart rate sensor

Moto 360 Price: £199

Moto 360 Release: October

Motorola’s rockstar CEO jumps ship as Lenovo promises smartphone profits

Motorola created some amazing devices in 2013 with Google’s backing, including the Moto X and Moto G. Of course, it also lost obscene amounts of money each and every quarter while doing it. Lenovo is preparing to finalizethe deal to buy Motorola from Google, and it’s planning to stop the losses in short order. However, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside isn’t going to be there to see it — Woodside has left Motorola to take the chief operating officer job at Dropbox. Is this the beginning of a Motorola brain-drain?

Woodside isn’t exactly a household name, but he is credited with leading the charge at Motorola over the last two years which resulted in the company once again making phones that people actually want to use. Losing him to Dropbox is undoubtedly a blow to Motorola, but he’s probably about to cash in big time on the Dropbox IPO. In some ways, it’s a step up — Dropbox is valued at about $10 billion right now, but the Motorola Mobility sale only valued the phone maker at a little under $3 billion.

Google bought Motorola back in 2012 probably expecting the company to continue losing money — although, hemorrhaging a few billion might not have been in the plan. It’s fairly clear at this point Google was willing to take that risk to get Motorola’s juicy patent portfolio, almost all of which it is holding on to. Lenovo isn’t buying Motorola to lose money, though. Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing says Motorola can be made profitable in just a few quarters. Let’s not ignore that Woodside was CEO of Motorola for two years as it lost money— that’s a big deal for a CEO.

Google sells Motorola to Lenovo for $3 billion, throws in the smartphone towel

It has been almost two years since Google completed the purchase of Motorola’s handset division, but its experiment in trying to be a competitive smartphone maker has finally come to an end. While there were always plenty of doubters — starting with me — about the wisdom of Google entering the handset business, Google never wavered publicly about its commitment to the challenge.
Eventually the reality of how hard it is to compete in the smartphone market without taking your eye off the ball in other areas sunk home to Google — likely with the disappointing sales of its much-anticipated and much-trumpeted Moto X phone. Larry Page admitted as much in his blog post announcing the sale: “… the smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices.” This point was no doubt driven home by the fact that the Motorola division lost Google almost $1 billion in 2013. Lenovo will pay $2.91 billion in cash to acquire Motorola Mobility’s handset division — some parts of the company, including most of the patents, will stay with Google.

Lenovo knows way more about phones than you think

When I toured Lenovo’s private suite at CES this year, one thing I didn’t expect to see was a selection of pretty amazing smartphones. Since Lenovo doesn’t sell phones here in the US or Western Europe — yet — it doesn’t get much attention as a smartphone maker from the tech press. But in a few years it has become the fastest-growing maker of smartphones, with 45 million units shipped in 2013. At CES, Lenovo executives were coy about their plans to enter the US market, saying it would happen in time, but that they wanted to move carefully. Clearly the Motorola Mobility purchase — assuming it gains approval from regulators and closes successfully — jumpstarts that process in a big way.

What about future products?

While in some ways this deal echoes Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s ThinkPad brand, there is one major difference — Lenovo already has a fairly broad, excellent, line of smartphone products, and a team that designs them. Without question some of the unique features of the Moto X, like always-on listening and custom covers, are worth keeping around, but it is hard to see Lenovo continuing both its own smartphone product lines and Motorola’s indefinitely. There will need to be some consolidation. Both companies have been silent about whether there will be a continued commitment to building some of the Motorola products in the USA. It is possible that regulators — already sensitive about Chinese companies purchasing flagship American technology names — may impose some conditions on the deal that affect this.
Current Lenovo phones are more traditional in approach than Motorola’s, with excellent hardware, great displays, and straightforward implementations of Android. They are also showing faster sales growth than almost any other line of phones. Motorola’s X and G have broken new ground in many areas, but they have hardly taken the US market by storm. Lenovo has said it will keep the Motorola brand separate, but it hasn’t said what that means for how it will merge the product lines. For those worried about the fate of the Ara modular phone research project, it is staying with Google and being moved to the Android group.

Will Lenovo play The Stig for Google?

Fans of hit series Top Gear are familiar with its “tame race car driver,” aka The Stig. The show gets to assign him all sorts of tasks, which he performs seemingly without complaint. Similarly, Google was likely looking for a more pliable business partner for Android than the hard-to-predict Samsung. With Samsung pushing its own app store and media hub, as well as Tizen — its Android alternative — Google probably wants to make sure it’s putting its mobile hardware jewels in more reliable hands.
At the same time, Google clearly can not afford to upset Samsung, on which it relies for the largest piece of Android sales. So it may not be a coincidence that the Lenovo deal was announced at just about the same time that Google and Samsung entered into a worldwide patent cross-licensing deal.
Personally, I’m excited by this deal — and not just because I said nearly two years ago that Google should sell Motorola. I’ve long been a fan of what Lenovo has done with the ThinkPad and IdeaPad product lines. With HTC in trouble, there hasn’t been a good competitor to Samsung in the US market for high-end Android phones. If Lenovo can combine some of the Moto X’s unique features, along with the excellent handset designs it is shipping around the world, consumers everywhere will benefit.