When you hear Motorola, what do you
think of? Phones? Maybe some
communications devices, but watches?
Here is the Moto Watch 2026. This is
following up on a bunch of other watches
that they've done recently where they
had kind of a number naming scheme
afterwards. And before that, they had
the Moto 360 which has a little bit of a
cult following. Let's see what their
newest offering looks like. The first
smart watch that I picked up was
actually a Basis Peak over 10 years ago.
That was owned by Intel of all people.
Unfortunately, that watch also had an
issue where the battery would
spontaneously start warming people's
wrists up. This guy's 47 mm, which
actually puts it slightly larger than
the 45 mm of my Venu 2 that I have,
which I could see people being a little
put off by that because it is quite
large. If you have smaller arms, smaller
wrists, it's going to look very obvious
there. But for someone my size,
it's nice. I like the bigger screen.
Right at the very front, we have a
sticky. It's got a QR code to download
the software, which is really, really
nice. On the note of the software
though, I believe this watch is only
available for Android devices. With the
watch out of the box here, it's a nice
clean design and I like how the straps
are molded to be part of
the casing itself. The band itself feels
pretty good, but one thing that concerns
me, even though this is replaceable, it
has your little toggles there for quick
swapping. This molding here isn't
necessarily going to fit nicely with
other watch straps. Because my watch has
the same 22 mm width band size, I'm
going to do a quick swap and see how it
looks.
Thankfully, these pins make it super
easy to swap over. You don't have to go
get the small kind of jeweler
screwdriver or shove the pin back in
between the casing and the strap itself.
That gives you actually a little bit
better of a side-by-side to on what the
difference is. It's not that much
bigger, but again, for people with
smaller wrists, it's going to be
noticeable. You know, that's not
actually too bad. No, that's perfectly
acceptable. You get a little bit of a
gap here, which is taken up by the
molded strap, but I'd say this is still
very reasonable. Before we go further,
let's check out what else is in the box
here.
We have a charging cable
and a little manual.
The included charging cable is one of
these kind of pucks that it will
magnetically sit at the back of the
watch here. That being said, it does
matter which orientation you have
because you've got the two little pogo
pins that will connect to those spots on
the back of the watch there. The magnet
itself on this dock is not super strong,
either. It's not confidence-inspiring
with how much play you've got even just
kind of moving the wire there. Another
piece that I noticed with the charger is
normally when you have your watch
charging, you're going to have it
sitting down. With these molded wrist
straps, um it makes it sit kind of
awkwardly. That makes it so that
your charger is also just kind of
floating around there. The cable is
USB-C, at least. And you've got a little
bit of length. They've put a measuring
tape on the back of the desk here, so we
can actually tell you it's a 24-in
cable, so 2 ft. The casing itself is
metal, uh but it is aluminum. The
downside to aluminum casings is that
they will get scratched and nicked up a
little bit more easily than something
like a stainless steel. The crown here
is made out of stainless steel, though.
So, the piece that you'll be potentially
knocking into a little bit more or
interacting with is a bit more robust.
So, the crown works to scroll, works as
a button, and we have a second button on
the side here. We'll check it out when
we boot it up. So, on your phone,
download and open the Moto Watch app.
Oh, that's kind of nice. It gives you
the option to see the QR code right in
the setup here, too. Just in case you've
lost that tiny little piece. Brings you
right to the app in the Play Store.
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Add watch. It's found the watch right
away is and we're connected. So, this is
where you would create a Moto account if
you want some of their extra ecosystem
features and exclusive Moto AI features.
We still don't really know what Moto AI
does, do we? No, we do not. Biometric
data, so you got to feed it
your
height and weight. This is going to be
so it can do more accurate calorie
counting. Everybody's got their own
algorithms that they use for this type
of thing. Motorola's actually partnered
with Polar to do a bunch of their
activity processing and the sensors on
the device. We'll take a little bit more
of a look at that
in a bit. I'm going to throw the watch
on and we're going to continue with the
tour on the watch itself. I did have
this for a few days to kind of get some
impressions on beforehand and now is a
good time to point out that I like the
idea here that they have with tucking
the tail of your strap down into the
inner part of your wrist there. It gets
it out of the way nicely, but for
someone with wrists as large as mine, it
just
barely misses. So, on the watch itself,
we're going to get started. Swiping down
brings you to a bit of a quick settings
menu and you can get back to the watch
face just by swiping up. Swiping up from
the bottom gives you your notifications.
One thing that I noticed with the
notifications though is that you don't
get the ability to quickly reply back to
messages like you do with most
smartwatches. Usually you'll have a
bunch of kind of pre-canned messages you
can set up that are okay or yes or no or
on my way. That just doesn't exist as an
option on this. Another piece that I
noticed with notifications that was a
little bit annoying is the notifications
on the watch are completely independent
from the notifications on the phone.
This means that if you get a
notification on the watch and you
dismiss it on the watch, it doesn't
dismiss that notification on the phone
itself.
Beyond that, I had a few issues with
notifications being a little
inconsistent on the like Google-based
notifications. These are things like the
weather alerts or the score of the
hockey game that's going on. They'd come
through sometimes, but not all the time.
I was wearing both the Moto Watch and my
Garmin watch at at time, so it was
really obvious to tell when it wasn't
working. Swiping to the right, you get a
bunch of these panels
where you can see your steps, you can
see your overall activity for the day.
You can find your sleep scores there.
Here is a place where you can see your
heart rate, your SPO2, which is your
blood oxygen saturation level, stress
indicator, and some media controls. From
any of these panels, you can always just
press the crown to get back to the watch
face as well. You don't have to cycle
through everything. Looking at the
screen, it is OLED and I did like the
brightness. It does have an auto
brightness feature, so it will
dynamically change the brightness
depending on how bright your environment
is around you. I never found an instance
where I was struggling to see what was
on the screen there. If I click the
crown, you do get a list of all of the
different apps, which you can scroll
through with the crown. Even though this
does look very similar to Wear OS, it is
Motorola's own implementation of the
software, and that means that you're not
going to have a bunch of downloadable
third-party apps. This is a little bit
of a bummer for people who like to be
able to throw like a Strava app onto
their watch and be able to go without
their phone completely and collect that
data into the app directly here. It
does, however, have the Google Health
Connect framework, so you can dump your
data into there and then use that to
kind of connect the data over to some of
the third-party apps that you might be
using. One of the reasons Motorola
decided to go this direction, though, is
so that they could get more battery life
out of their product. The Moto 360,
which was one of their previous watches,
had Wear OS on it, and it was a one-day
watch. You had to charge it every single
day. This one, on the other hand, can go
up to 13 days, and in the time that I
spent using it, it looked like it was on
track for that. If you turn on some of
the other features, like always-on
display and constant SPO2 monitoring,
that battery life will drop quickly. On
the flip side though, if you find
yourself with a dead watch, the first 5
minutes of charging will get you about a
day's worth of charge. It will slow down
after that, but that at least gets you
up and running quickly. The bottom
button by default gets you into your
exercises here, which there are a lot of
different things that you can choose
from. The default list here has
everything from outdoor walking to
running to strength training to cricket
and belly dancing. You didn't test that
one? No, I didn't test the belly
dancing. Where's the e-sports exercise?
I don't see e-sports in here. And it's
it's crazy how many different things
that they have in here. If you don't
want that to be a button for exercises
though, we can go into the settings. We
can customize what that button does. So,
you can have it go to your daily
activities. You can have it go to
vitality, heart rates. One thing that we
haven't touched on yet is it does
actually have a speaker and microphone.
So, we can open up a telephone app and
dial a number in here and you could
phone it. I did test it out earlier when
I had it attached to my phone and seems
to work reasonably well. The microphone
was strong enough that the person on the
other side could hear it just fine and
the speaker was loud enough that I
didn't have any trouble hearing it at
least in an indoors environment. The
watch does have an IP68 rating, which is
nice to see, but typically I personally
like going for something that has a bit
more of a water ingress rating than
that. IP68 is about equivalent to one
atmosphere's worth of water resistance
and the Garmin ones that I typically use
and I believe
the Samsung ones also have up to five
atmospheres. This will be fine in the
shower. It will be fine out in the rain,
but I don't know if I would trust it
being submerged for long periods of
time. The way they do the atmosphere
rating is kind of at the depth that they
expect the device to be able to go to.
So, one atmosphere will be about 10 m,
five atmosphere about 50 m, and 10
atmosphere, 100 m. Earlier I did mention
Polar. Polar [snorts] is a brand that
has been very health focused and mostly
in the kind of sensor side. Their item
that people typically look to as the
gold standard is their chest strap for
heart rate monitoring. It's encouraging
to see Motorola using a partner that has
some authority in the space, but without
a longer time with the device, it's
difficult to see what the results are of
that. At this price point, that might be
all you need though. The Moto Watch
comes in at $150, which is a great price
point to be just kind of checking out a
new device. It does put it in a space
that has lots of competition though.
Amazfit has numerous devices at that
price point, and nothing has their CMF
watch as well. But with the few days
that I spent with the device, it wasn't
bad. I'd say it's worth checking out.
I'll leave a link in the description for
you to be able to get to the product
page, but try and find it on your own.
Moto's got a little bit of a mess in
terms of their websites. There's their
main Motorola website, but they also
have a Moto Watch website, and depending
on where you end up, it's almost
impossible to find this thing. If you
want to see another watch that we've
covered kind of in the same price point,
check out the CMF Pro 2.
Adam took a look at that one, and he
seemed to like it as well.