so way back in the Stone Age Motorola worked with me very briefly when I did
my Moto X and Moto G reviews then they went silent for a bit and frankly I
didn't care anyway then the Moto 360 got
announced and went holy crap I need to get in touch with Motorola again and
apparently so did every other reviewer on the planet because I finally got one
a couple of weeks ago just like we finally got the go-ahead to publish our
senheiser factory tour soon yay and so
here are my thoughts on the Moto 360 specifically and Android Wear in general
I
guess The Cooler Master nepton 240m features an exclusive pump design and
their new silencio fans to provide impressive near silent performance click
now to learn more the setup process with the Android
Wear app is really simple I'm pairing my phone worked effortlessly but what
exactly did I just pair my phone to Hardware rundown time on the inside of
the watch you'll find 500 112 Megs of RAM 4 gigs of storage Bluetooth 4.0 low
energy a podometer and heart rate monitor dual microphones a vibration
motor a 320 mAh battery that supports
wireless charging with the included Dock and finally and this has been the source
of much discussion about this device even though it doesn't seem to have a
performance impact a Texas Instruments TI omap 3630 processor which is a
4-year-old CPU design built on a 45 NM
manufacturing process so the speculation is that Motorola could have potentially
extended battery life with something a little bit newer onto the outside I've
got the stone horor leather band on mine
which I think is pretentious hipster for not waterproof but very lightweight and
comfortable dyed cowhide but if you don't like leather then it's available
in a variety of well okay there's a different color of leather but also it's
available with metal bands although the Tinker among you may want to pick up the
leather model anyway and then a pebble metal band for 30 bucks they're actually
compatible and you can do the swap yourself if you're a little bit handy
The Watch Body itself is IP67 water and dust prooof something you can learn more
about here if you feel like it and features a heart rate monitor on the
bottom a stainless steel housing around the round watch face with a microphone
port on the left and the watch's lone physical button on the right then
finally the main event a 1.56 in 320x
290 backlit LCD touchscreen display covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 3 I
think this is a good opportunity to say I was really impressed with the watch's
ruggedness overall I'm pretty careless and in spite of me wearing it every day
for 2 weeks the Moto 360 you see in our close-up footage is in basically perfect
condition excellent considering that this is what my daily driver watches
tend to end up looking like even if they have Gorilla Glass the display is good
it's 205 pixel per inch pixel density is noticeably non-retina but not enough to
be normally distracting in day-to-day use and viewing angles are very good
with full brightness and a watch face with high contrast between colors but in
ambient mode when the display is on but dim you will need to look at it a bit
more directly what is ambient mode you might ask well instead of just having
the display off or Max brightness with a
very deliberate motion gesture required to wake it up ambient mode is much more
Loosey Goosey about waking up when you gesture more casually and then it stays
on i'llbe it at a lower brightness for longer after activation allowing you to
use the watch more naturally you know tilt it toward yourself on the couch use
it while lying on your back uh you know pull up your sleeve before checking it
and lots of other stuff that doesn't normally work very well in the in the
regular mode if you're using ambient mode you can probably still get through
a full day on the battery but it's much tighter and you can basically forget
about using a lot of the Android Wear functionality that's being added like
running apps or even games directly on the watch oh yeah Linus Android Wear how
is that anyway honestly right now pretty buggy um thankfully there were no
outright crashes or anything but while none of this stuff happened consistently
enough for me to reproduce it on camera here are some irritating bugs I've
encountered over the last couple of weeks in no particular order uh refusing
to take voice commands while running turn-by-turn navigation failing to
display incoming calls on the watch even though I can clear see they're coming in
on the phone and they are connected switching to a playlist of the ringtones
on my phone when I receive a text message while listening to Google play
music over a Bluetooth headset displaying gobble deg instead of proper
characters in place of weather and date data and the list just goes on and at
times honestly the stuff that did work correctly wasn't a lot better thought
out if I get text messages from two different people in between checking and
responding to them not only can I not do ful things like respond with voice or
Mark as red I can't even read them
Hangouts handles this much better with swipes to the right opening the message
that you start your swipe on but not Everyone likes Hangouts Google and
another great example of this broken functionality is Twitter direct messages
and mentions just pile up with the only option being open on
phone I also dislike the way information
gets managed sometimes music Control is one of those situations where if I'm
listening to music I probably want the control of it at my fingertips and it'll
get buried under other cards as new notifications roll in another is if I'm
on a call it would be nice if there was a notification card for it I can accept
a call with the watch but I can't terminate it I mean what if I use my
Watch to take the call because I was planning to use a speaker phone like if
I'm driving or a wired headset if I have to take the phone out of my pocket to
hang up then the watch is very purpose of me not needing to take out my phone
phone was defeated there is really great
stuff too though reading whole emails instead of being stuck with previews
like the pebble is almost a switchable advantage in and of itself Google Now
voice recognition worked great for me indicating solid integrated mics drop
cam notifications complete with a snapshot of what's going on are awesome
for checking on the baby and discovering that I could have my turn-by-turn
navigation on my wrist was another almost switchable moment for me and
probably a lot of people who don't have Car mounts for their phones and that's
just that's just the tip of what Android Wear will be able to do in the future I
mean you can already get other cool stuff like thirdparty watch face
managers um I used facer which you can use to download and create new watch
faces to augment the utterly anemic stock selection although I have to say
it is appalling to me that you even need to work around with a third party tool
for this but I digress and then there are other useful apps including the
usual Smartwatch you know ring my phone buzz me if I go out of range and health
tracker stuff but also you know some androidy stuff in there like custom
launchers which you can learn about here
uh calculators a Google Keep integration a network status change Notifier a
screen Locker so errant water drops don't fire up Google Now all the time if
you're in the shower for example and even this super handy spin the bottle
app if you happen to be a daring adolescent okay that one's not that
useful but at the point is we're going to see more in the future so bottom line
though is it awesome lonus are you ready to abandon your Pebble Steel for Android
Wear the answer is unfortunately no um
part of this is the hardware I continue to believe in the importance of
multi-day batteries for mobile devices even though the convenient wireless
charging dock takes some of the sting out but the biggest part of the problem
here for me is software smartphones won
me over to single day batteries by giving me Oodles of function ity that my
old flip couldn't and while being able to run apps in the background on a on a
watch something that Pebble can't do opens up a whole new world of
possibilities I would still personally hold off a little bit more until Android
Wear continues to mature because it will mature I can already see it's going to
be awesome this isn't like the last time the industry tried to tack extra
functionality onto what is classically just a Time piece and a fashion
statement speaking of extra functionality our friends over at zboard
have some pretty sweet deals going on for a very limited time just head over
to zboard shop.com Linus to save up to
$300 on various additions of the zboard
I got a chance to check out the San Francisco special edition of the zboard
back in July and you can watch my review video of it here spoiler alert it's
badass and it's actually improved since then as well the board itself is thinner
and lighter making it even easier to commute with and store your destination
and they have a new urethane wheel upgrade available that increases both
the top speed and the range of the board on a battery charge very significantly
pretty amazing stuff they've got deals on all three versions of the board as
well as the wheel and led upgrades so you can properly kit out your board for
optimal visibility and efficiency so head over to the Forum post Linked In
the video description where you can get the full details for all the zboard
details Deals Deals I said almost said
details again but I think I recovered pretty well I bet most of you didn't even notice that they're offering as
well as the full details on the giveaway that they're running for one of each
model of the board it's a great product I use mine all the time these are great
deals and they're also just genuinely nice folks over there so be sure to
check it out other things to check out guys are the like and dislike button so
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