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.

Comments

not ready for prime time

[turkeydance]

i saw what you did there

Re:Google

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Is the moto 360 a google product? If so I won't wear it.

Why don't you use Bing to find the answer?

software not ready?

[Anonymous Coward]

You say the software isn't ready? I say the hardware isn't ready. How in the world is a watch with a battery life of 12 hours even close to usable?

Ooh, nice watch you have there? What time is it?

I don't know, the battery died around dinner time.

That sounds annoying. Does it happen often?

Yes, every frickin day!

Re:software not ready?

[SternisheFan]

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

What's next after the smart watch?

[QuietLagoon]

Let's see, we've had smart phones for a while. Now we seem to be entering the fad of smart watches. When the smart watch fad dies down, what will replace it?

.
Smart rings?

Re:What's next after the smart watch?

[kuhnto]

Smart Belt Buckles...

Re:What's next after the smart watch?

[LodCrappo]

definitely won't be people

Re:What's next after the smart watch?

[Schaffner]

I think it will be smart pants. We can call them smarty pants.

Re:What's next after the smart watch?

[Triv]

So close. SO close.

"Smart iPants" is what you were reaching for.

Battery life seems to be a killer

[wile_e8]

I've seen a lot of people on this site bash smartwatches if they have less than a week of battery life, and that always seemed like overkill to me. I suspect a lot of people (most?) are like me and take off their watches at night anyways. As such, placing it on a wireless charger dock at night doesn't seem like a problem - as long as the watch has enough battery life to get through the day until I take it off at night. Which is doesn't, according to these reviews. I don't know if I like the look of one enough to buy one anyways, but that would keep me from buying one even if it was better looking.

Re:Battery life seems to be a killer

[LodCrappo]

I've been messing around with an LG G watch for several weeks now (part time android dev, just getting to know the platform). It lasts over 24 hours on a charge, often approaching 48 hours if I don't fool with it a whole lot and turn off the "always on" display. To me, this is quite reasonable. Set it on the charger when you take it off each night, but if you do forget, it will still work for a good part of the next day. FWIW the battery life on the Moto X is similar, about 36 hours, and being able to use the phone all morning even when i fail to charge the night before has been very, very handy. I suspect if you're a heavy watch user you would appreciate the "day and a half" range of battery life in a similar manner.

As for the 360.. Initial reports from early users said they were getting "almost two days", which would correlate with what I've seen on the LG G, and make it perfectly reasonable in the battery life department IMHO. However, as the official reviews come out today it seems they are reporting ~25% of the LG G lifespan, which is insanely awful... If true, that puts the 360 firmly into the useless category.

Re:Battery life seems to be a killer

[LodCrappo]

I gave up on the Pebble long ago (found it mostly useless), but one thing I do remember is that I was constantly running out of battery while out and about. I've been using an LG G watch for quite a while now, and running out of battery has never been an issue.

It is counter intuitive, but the LG's ~36 hours better life actually works much more reliably for me than the Pebble's two days (when it goes all buggy) to 7-8 days (when it doesn't, and you mostly ignore it), The reason is that I *know* I charge the LG every night, just like my cell phone. I quickly got into the habit of setting the watch down on it's charger thing as I put my wallet, phone, whatever on the nightstand etc. The LG is forgiving enough if you do forget to charge that you'll probably make it at least till noon the next day, but I almost never forget for the simple reason that it's a short, consistent pattern.

With the Pebble, I didn't want to wear out the battery by partially discharging each day then charging back to full each night (TBH I don't know if it's battery works that way, I just figure less charge cycles is probably "good" somehow.. shrug). So I tried to remember to check, pay attention to the low battery alert, whatever. It just didn't work. It was much more tedious and failure prone then just knowing I set something in a certain place each night. Sure, I could have just said screw it and charged it every night regardless, but then it's only equivalent to the Android options at best.

Re:Battery life seems to be a killer

[Andy Dodd]

The whole "partial discharges are bad" thing dates way back to the old days of timer-based NiCd chargers. Back then, chargers were dumb - they terminated the charge cycle based solely on a timer, and not based on detecting a full charge. The infamous "memory effect" wasn't actually the thing at play in most cases there - it's actually extremely difficult to reproduce outside of a lab. The problem was simple overcharging due to dumb timed chargers. As far as users were concerned, the symptoms were the same as "memory effect" so the myth stuck.

In general, partial discharges/recharges of a lithium-ion are far less stressful to it than a full discharge/recharge. However - li-ion/li-po batteries tend to lose capacity more rapidly if they are routinely kept at a high state of charge. Lithium batteries are "happiest" when they hover around 50% state of charge. (This is one of the reasons Teslas default to only charging up to around 80% unless you specifically "top it off")

Lead-acids like most non-EV car batteries are quite different beasts - they are happiest when fully charged, and will lose capacity RAPIDLY to sulfation if let to sit when partially discharged.

Re:Circular LCDs

[Tukz]

It's a new thing called "fashion".
I'd much rather have a round watch than the current trend of recangular smartwatches.

Re:Circular LCDs

[Andrio]

Android Wear supports both round and rectangular screens. The reason for this is fashion, and fashion will always beat out pure function.

Re:A watch?

[tlhIngan]

Is it just me or are these things redundant? Why would I want my wrist encumbered with anything, let alone a watch? Wherefore art thou oh smart ring?

In the quest for choosing bigger numbers, Android manufacturers have been increasing average screen size to the point where the phones themselves are too big to hold in one hand or put in a pocket.

This makes the phones great for watching movies and Netflix, and gaming, but positively lousy if you want to communicate with people. I mean, you can't put it in your pocket (at least the small tight formfitting ones), and it's too big and tiresome to keep digging it out every 30 seconds to see if you have a new text or email or Facebook post.

So they invent a smartwatch that lets you keep the phone in your bag or purse (because you can't carrying it anywhere else due to size), but you can still get texts and remain "connected" without having to dig out the monstrosity.

Of course, you may argue there are plenty of small screen phones, and yes, you're right, however, the flagships have been getting bigger and bigger. And people who have flagship phones generally are more interested in smart watches (more $$$), than someone who just gets whatever phone is free today.

That's why smartwatches are around - phones have been getting bigger and bigger, and soon we'll be hauling around bricks like 80s style cellphones. (Ironically, the move to smaller and smaller phones in the late 90s and early 00s lead to more people using Bluetooth because they were too small to talk to comfortably).

Battery consumption due to CPU?

[flux]

Everyone keeps saying how this doesn't have the latest most powersaving CPU but how much CPU does this device even need? Once a second to update the hand? Or could even be a few times a minute for a smooth minute hand.

I would be surprised if the overwhelming majority of the amperage doesn't go to the display and the BLE radio (in that order), the CPU coming last.

Re:Screen FAIL

[LodCrappo]

yeah, except for the part where it actually works fine in sunlight.