Slashdot Mirror
Moto 360 Reviews Arrive
An anonymous reader writes: Reviews for the Moto 360 smartwatch have started to roll in. David Pierce at The Verge praises the design: the circular display is framed by an unadorned, stainless steel shell, and fastened to your wrist with a simple leather strap. At the same time, he criticized the battery life, saying the device averaged around 12 hours of use before it needed to be charged. Pierce adds, "The Moto 360's most impressive feature is that I stopped noticing it almost immediately. Whenever I wear the LG G Watch or the Samsung Gear Live, I'm constantly compelled to fidget with it; there's this unexplainable feeling of having something alien on my wrist that is there because I need to use it. The 360, on the other hand, just vanished into the spot left on my wrist by the Seiko watch that conveniently died this week." AnandTech takes a deeper dive into the device's hardware, noting that the TI OMAP 3 processor is built on a somewhat old 45nm process, which necessitates higher power consumption than newer, smaller processes. The Wall Street Journal says it's easy to get used to speaking into your watch for basic functions, but the software — and thus, the Moto 360 as a whole — still isn't quite ready for prime time. However, almost all the reviews agree that the smartwatch's time is coming.
Because it's only going to be a few days until Apple's announcement.
Having a round LCD screen is stupid. There is just no reason for it. The image is displayed anyway as rows and columns, which is inherently rectangular. It's just a holdover from mechanical watches that rotate on a central axis. The circular LCD will never hold as much information as a same resolution rectangular LCD, plus the engineering to get it to work is a lot more complicated. I see round LCDs as a waste of perfectly good screen real estate, and technology. That engineering could be put to much better use than (almost literally) to cram a square peg into a round hole.