Why You Can Trust CNET Motorola Moto 360 review: Motorola's round watch not a full revolution
It's good-looking, but it's not good enough: after wearing it for a month, Motorola's watch still isn't what we hoped for. Our full review.
- Nearly 20 years writing about tech, and over a decade reviewing wearable tech, VR, and AR products and apps
Everyone's trying to create magic on your wrist. To date, few have succeeded.
Motorola Moto 360
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Motorola's Moto 360 was the first draw-dropping wearable concept of 2014 when it was teased back in March: a round watch running futuristic Google software, it seemed like a device descended from the middle future. Clearly, this was the next wave of wrist-tech.
The Moto 360 is the first round
Wear smartwatch. Others will come, including the LG G Watch R , but this is the first you can buy. At $250 in the US, it's $30 more than the original LG G Watch , and $50 more than the Samsung Gear Live . It'll arrive in other countries later this year, costing £200 in the UK.
I've been wearing the Moto 360 for about a month, and I really wanted it to be the ultimate smartwatch. But it's not. The Moto 360 is a mixed bag of a gadget, yet another smartwatch rather than a must-have.
Yes, the Moto 360 is distinctive. It has great watch faces, a good wrist strap and better microphones to understand your voice commands. But, at its heart, this watch suffers the very same problems as other Android Wear watches: middling battery life, strange quasi-interactive notifications and apps that are hard to access.
It's not Motorola's fault. The real issue is Android Wear, Google's operating system for wearables. It's just not a killer experience yet. The Moto 360 is just a prettier shell for Android Wear. It brings nothing new to your forearm. And so, under the hood, it's really not a better watch. Which is a shame, because with a better battery life, improved software, and a better understanding of fitness apps, this could be a pretty interesting device. Those updates may still happen over time. But they're not here yet.
Design
The Moto 360 is a cool-looking smartwatch. There's no doubt about that. But as I strapped it on my wrist for the first time, it all seemed a step below the fantastic dream-device glimpsed months ago.
Other round Android Wear smartwatches will be on the way eventually, including the LG G Watch R, but the Moto 360 is the first to arrive. And it's not only fun to see a round display, but the watch construction is elegant, too.
A round, brushed stainless-steel body sits on top of a Chicago leather watch strap that runs right into the main body. The Moto 360 comes in two metal colors: black, and a natural stainless steel. My review unit was black, with a black leather strap. Other leather bands come in gray and stone. Extra bands cost $30, and a version with a stainless steel segmented band will debut later this year for $300. You can buy that band when it's available down the road and put it on your leather Moto 360: it'll cost an extra $80.
The Moto 360 body feels thick compared to its strap, and its round display is slightly too large -- larger than many people might like. But the clean design and lightweight feel give it a Movado-like minimalism.
On the side of the Moto 360, there's a little home button that looks like a watch crown. Unlike the Apple Watch's fancy turning digital crown, this is just a button. It activates the watch or puts it to sleep, or brings up a settings menu when you press and hold it.
On the back, the smooth surface has an optical green LED heart-rate monitor in the middle, while the rest of the back is inductive for contact-free charging.
On a whole, the Moto 360 has the looks of something from the future: like a real watch, but also some sort of glowing round mini-marvel. But under the hood it's less of a magical experience. The illusion falls apart, sometimes.
For instance, the Gorilla Glass-covered round 1.56-inch-diameter touch display, which actually sits slightly raised above the metal housing, is prone to smudging. The LCD screen underneath, which has a resolution of 320x290 pixels and a pixel density of 205 ppi, looks bright but not as eye-popping or crisp as some OLED displays allow. Text looks a little fuzzy and washed-out if you peer at it up close.
And then, there's that black bar under the round display.
Your eyes aren't deceiving you. In Motorola's quest for a round screen with the thinnest outer bezel possible, a custom design resulted in an added black bar that cuts the circle off by a sliver. That black bar houses an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting screen brightness.
The little bar isn't a deal-killer, but boy, for a watch this obsessed with looking flawlessly beautiful, it certainly stands out. It's even more baffling when you consider that another upcoming round Android Wear watch, the LG G Watch R, doesn't have that black bar -- and its thicker bezel doesn't really look all that bad. All-white watchfaces end up looking like they had a little slice cut out of them. It ruins what's an otherwise impressive design.
Being round really makes the watchfaces pop: the seven included watchfaces look fantastic, far better than the odd assortment of faces on the rectangular Samsung Gear Live and LG G Watch. They make the Moto 360 look more like an actual watch, taking advantage of the round design to create virtual analog hands that sweep across. You can also add your own custom faces by hunting around Google Play.
Android Wear doesn't always make the most of the round design; some apps feel cut off or cropped, and notifications seem oddly laid out. Android Wear's UI doesn't feel organic or customized to a round screen as much as it could have been.
What makes the Moto 360 different
Besides being round, the Moto 360 has a few other hardware distinctions from other Android Wear watches I've used: its contact-free inductive charging and dock (which uses similar technology as other inductive charging mats and accessories, like those for the Nexus 5), its heart-rate monitor, and its improved noise-cancelling microphone technology.
The included charger and cradle are clever, too. Just drop the watch in and it starts charging, while the display flips to a bedside-clock mode. A gentle blue ring shows the charge progress. It actually makes a really cool bedside clock, but not a great alarm, because it lacks a speaker (it vibrates instead). It's also not a perfect travel charger -- the cradle's big, and the inductive charging doesn't use magnets or use any manner of clip-on. You need a flat surface to place it on, which rules out backpacks or airline seat pockets.
Motorola prides itself on excellent microphones, and the Moto 360 is better at understanding what I say in a crowded room than any other smartwatch I've seen. It recognizes my voice at near-whisper in crowded rooms, subvocally even, and I've rarely seen it fail. But it only uses that voice recognition for Google Now searches and text transcription: it can't make audio phone calls or send voice messages. And since there's no speaker, you can't use the Moto 360 as a speakerphone, either. This is the same as every other Android Wear watch to date.
The optical LED-based heart-rate monitor on the back is a little like the one on the Samsung Gear Live and works the same as other wrist-worn heart-rate monitors. You can have it ping your heart rate via a cool-looking Motorola app that looks like a needle spinning on a gauge, or you can use Google's own parallel app. Both take similar readings. Sometimes my heart rate wasn't recognized; I had to adjust the watch. Perhaps it was my hairy arms. After a few seconds, its continuous readings stabilized.
But Motorola's app, and Google's, for that matter, have no coaching mode; no way to calculate target heart rate. A separate "heart activity" app aims to measure your active motion each day: 30 minutes of moderate activity, for five days a week. It might say "15 minutes to go," but it's hard to tell whether the app's using heart-rate data or something else, and what you should do next. The heart-rate accuracy seemed to vary at times, too. It's not enough to throw a heart-rate monitor on a watch. People need help integrating one into their everyday lives.
The rest of the Moto 360 is similar to other Android Wear watches: 4GB of onboard storage, 512MB of RAM, and a microphone for voice commands. Its Texas Instruments OMAP 3 processor looks less robust on paper than the processors on Samsung and LG's watches, but performance for all everyday Android Wear tasks feels about the same.
Android Wear: Still a work in progress
All Android Wear watches run the same software: the Moto 360, Samsung Gear Live and LG G Watch work the same. Google's mobile wearable operating system doesn't change, except for the included watchfaces on each watch.
Android Wear runs on Android phones only (Android 4.3 and later), and serves mainly as a way to push Google Now to your wrist. You can talk to Android Wear to search Google, write notes, make appointments, or set an alarm, but sometimes it's hard to tell what Google Now will understand and what it won't.
Meanwhile, notifications from your Android phone get pushed in via banners: some when messages come through, others in more predictive fashion, Google Now-style: what current commute time looks like, what the weather is at home, or what time the next sports game is for the team it thinks you like to follow.
You can swipe away notification cards or even mildly interact with them, but these notifications have a habit of coming back from the dead. I've had Twitter and sports headlines repeatedly re-appear on my watch after swiping them away. Android Wear needs to be smarter at its pop-up card pestering.
There are a lot of Android Wear-ready apps that install automatically once they're on your phone, and they range from useful to obscure. A Philips Hue app turns lights on and off, and a cookbook app shows recipes and timers. But, launching, finding and curating these apps becomes confusing and difficult. Android Wear doesn't feel interactive enough, or clearly laid-out enough, to be truly useful.
Battery life
The Moto 360 originally had pretty bad battery life, lasting less than 12 hours without fiddling with settings. A recent firmware update has improved things: continually connected with an ambient always-on screen, the Moto 360 now lasts about 20 hours on a charge. I tried pairing with a Nexus 5, and a Samsung Galaxy S5. With ambient mode off, which keeps the screen dark most of the time, battery life can lean towards two days. This is similar to what other Android Wear watches like the Samsung Gear Live and LG G Watch achieve.
The battery starts to dip down at night, and you'll definitely need to recharge in that included cradle before going to sleep. Unfortunately, the Moto 360's coolest charging trick, inductive charging, is also its drawback. You just need to rest the 360 in its cradle to top off, which requires a flat surface. Having a magnet, or even a dongle to clip on, would at least let it slide into a bag or airline seat pocket and continue charging. It took a little under 2 hours to charge up to 100 percent from a fully dead watch.
The Moto 360 suffers what most pretty-smart smartwatches suffer: a battery life that needs coddling and attending to. This is yet another gadget to charge at night. Are you ready for that responsibility? I prefer smartwatches that last at least three or four days, like the Pebble, even if they're less technologically powerful.
Conclusion
What do you want, proof that a nice-looking smartwatch can be made, or a great smartwatch?
The Moto 360 is the best-looking Android Wear watch, and one of the best-designed smartwatches. But looks don't matter in wearables half as much as function. And at that, the Moto 360 is still mired in what the rest of Android Wear's suffering through: mediocrity.
I really, really wanted to love the Moto 360. But it's not sitting on my wrist now. I've given it a rest. It's not even the battery life, or the oddly flawed not-completely-round display, that turned me off the most. It's Android Wear. Android Wear isn't good enough to make people fall in love with it. It won't make you want to run out and adopt an Android phone.
The Moto 360 was meant to be the hero for Android Wear, and Google wearables. Maybe next year. Right now, it's merely the best Android Wear watch. That might be enough for smartwatch aficionados and wearable tech geeks like myself, but it's not good enough for anyone else.