Moto 360 by Motorola Smartwatch - My First Android Wear Experience
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,997 words · ~9 min read
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so way back in the Stone Age Motorola worked with me very briefly when I did
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my Moto X and Moto G reviews then they went silent for a bit and frankly I
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didn't care anyway then the Moto 360 got
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announced and went holy crap I need to get in touch with Motorola again and
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apparently so did every other reviewer on the planet because I finally got one
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a couple of weeks ago just like we finally got the go-ahead to publish our
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senheiser factory tour soon yay and so
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here are my thoughts on the Moto 360 specifically and Android Wear in general
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I
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guess The Cooler Master nepton 240m features an exclusive pump design and
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their new silencio fans to provide impressive near silent performance click
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now to learn more the setup process with the Android
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Wear app is really simple I'm pairing my phone worked effortlessly but what
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exactly did I just pair my phone to Hardware rundown time on the inside of
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the watch you'll find 500 112 Megs of RAM 4 gigs of storage Bluetooth 4.0 low
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energy a podometer and heart rate monitor dual microphones a vibration
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motor a 320 mAh battery that supports
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wireless charging with the included Dock and finally and this has been the source
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of much discussion about this device even though it doesn't seem to have a
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performance impact a Texas Instruments TI omap 3630 processor which is a
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4-year-old CPU design built on a 45 NM
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manufacturing process so the speculation is that Motorola could have potentially
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extended battery life with something a little bit newer onto the outside I've
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got the stone horor leather band on mine
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which I think is pretentious hipster for not waterproof but very lightweight and
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comfortable dyed cowhide but if you don't like leather then it's available
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in a variety of well okay there's a different color of leather but also it's
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available with metal bands although the Tinker among you may want to pick up the
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leather model anyway and then a pebble metal band for 30 bucks they're actually
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compatible and you can do the swap yourself if you're a little bit handy
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The Watch Body itself is IP67 water and dust prooof something you can learn more
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about here if you feel like it and features a heart rate monitor on the
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bottom a stainless steel housing around the round watch face with a microphone
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port on the left and the watch's lone physical button on the right then
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finally the main event a 1.56 in 320x
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290 backlit LCD touchscreen display covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 3 I
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think this is a good opportunity to say I was really impressed with the watch's
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ruggedness overall I'm pretty careless and in spite of me wearing it every day
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for 2 weeks the Moto 360 you see in our close-up footage is in basically perfect
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condition excellent considering that this is what my daily driver watches
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tend to end up looking like even if they have Gorilla Glass the display is good
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it's 205 pixel per inch pixel density is noticeably non-retina but not enough to
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be normally distracting in day-to-day use and viewing angles are very good
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with full brightness and a watch face with high contrast between colors but in
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ambient mode when the display is on but dim you will need to look at it a bit
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more directly what is ambient mode you might ask well instead of just having
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the display off or Max brightness with a
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very deliberate motion gesture required to wake it up ambient mode is much more
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Loosey Goosey about waking up when you gesture more casually and then it stays
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on i'llbe it at a lower brightness for longer after activation allowing you to
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use the watch more naturally you know tilt it toward yourself on the couch use
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it while lying on your back uh you know pull up your sleeve before checking it
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and lots of other stuff that doesn't normally work very well in the in the
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regular mode if you're using ambient mode you can probably still get through
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a full day on the battery but it's much tighter and you can basically forget
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about using a lot of the Android Wear functionality that's being added like
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running apps or even games directly on the watch oh yeah Linus Android Wear how
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is that anyway honestly right now pretty buggy um thankfully there were no
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outright crashes or anything but while none of this stuff happened consistently
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enough for me to reproduce it on camera here are some irritating bugs I've
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encountered over the last couple of weeks in no particular order uh refusing
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to take voice commands while running turn-by-turn navigation failing to
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display incoming calls on the watch even though I can clear see they're coming in
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on the phone and they are connected switching to a playlist of the ringtones
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on my phone when I receive a text message while listening to Google play
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music over a Bluetooth headset displaying gobble deg instead of proper
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characters in place of weather and date data and the list just goes on and at
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times honestly the stuff that did work correctly wasn't a lot better thought
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out if I get text messages from two different people in between checking and
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responding to them not only can I not do ful things like respond with voice or
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Mark as red I can't even read them
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Hangouts handles this much better with swipes to the right opening the message
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that you start your swipe on but not Everyone likes Hangouts Google and
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another great example of this broken functionality is Twitter direct messages
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and mentions just pile up with the only option being open on
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phone I also dislike the way information
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gets managed sometimes music Control is one of those situations where if I'm
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listening to music I probably want the control of it at my fingertips and it'll
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get buried under other cards as new notifications roll in another is if I'm
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on a call it would be nice if there was a notification card for it I can accept
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a call with the watch but I can't terminate it I mean what if I use my
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Watch to take the call because I was planning to use a speaker phone like if
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I'm driving or a wired headset if I have to take the phone out of my pocket to
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hang up then the watch is very purpose of me not needing to take out my phone
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phone was defeated there is really great
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stuff too though reading whole emails instead of being stuck with previews
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like the pebble is almost a switchable advantage in and of itself Google Now
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voice recognition worked great for me indicating solid integrated mics drop
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cam notifications complete with a snapshot of what's going on are awesome
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for checking on the baby and discovering that I could have my turn-by-turn
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navigation on my wrist was another almost switchable moment for me and
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probably a lot of people who don't have Car mounts for their phones and that's
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just that's just the tip of what Android Wear will be able to do in the future I
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mean you can already get other cool stuff like thirdparty watch face
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managers um I used facer which you can use to download and create new watch
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faces to augment the utterly anemic stock selection although I have to say
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it is appalling to me that you even need to work around with a third party tool
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for this but I digress and then there are other useful apps including the
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usual Smartwatch you know ring my phone buzz me if I go out of range and health
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tracker stuff but also you know some androidy stuff in there like custom
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launchers which you can learn about here
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uh calculators a Google Keep integration a network status change Notifier a
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screen Locker so errant water drops don't fire up Google Now all the time if
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you're in the shower for example and even this super handy spin the bottle
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app if you happen to be a daring adolescent okay that one's not that
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useful but at the point is we're going to see more in the future so bottom line
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though is it awesome lonus are you ready to abandon your Pebble Steel for Android
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Wear the answer is unfortunately no um
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part of this is the hardware I continue to believe in the importance of
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multi-day batteries for mobile devices even though the convenient wireless
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charging dock takes some of the sting out but the biggest part of the problem
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here for me is software smartphones won
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me over to single day batteries by giving me Oodles of function ity that my
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old flip couldn't and while being able to run apps in the background on a on a
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watch something that Pebble can't do opens up a whole new world of
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possibilities I would still personally hold off a little bit more until Android
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Wear continues to mature because it will mature I can already see it's going to
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be awesome this isn't like the last time the industry tried to tack extra
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functionality onto what is classically just a Time piece and a fashion
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statement speaking of extra functionality our friends over at zboard
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check it out other things to check out guys are the like and dislike button so
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