Moto 360 review | Hacker News Reader

Moto 360 review

theverge.com

69 pointsDoubleguitars73 comments

So, here's something I've been wondering about smart watches, maybe someone here can answer.

It seems like the big dealbreaker for these is battery life. But a cheap watch with quartz timekeeping and digital lcd display can last a year or more on a single small battery.

Would it be possible to sandwich two lcd displays into the face of the watch, one that is cheap and one that is high-res full-color? Always display the time in the common janky digits, and then when touched, hand off to the nice display? You could even get them to quickly crossfade as the backlight turns on.

That way your $300 watch is at least as good as a $10 watch. Would that be possible?

But then you wouldn't get a daily awesome watch face. Nor cards without waking it up. As it is, cards will appear even on dimmed screens.

I don't think that the display is the biggest energy draw here. It will be the CPU which is drawing most power compared to the quartz crystal in a simple $10 LCD watch.

In which case, could you hibernate the CPU as well as the screen, but still leave the time on display?

but then you are defeating the purpose of wearing a smartwatch, which I believe is to keep receiving notifications for calls, emails, messages and so on. If you only wake up the CPU every minute to check then it's far too slow to be useful.

Forgive me for being a bit out of touch.

Is the idea of a smartwatch to be your main phone, small enough to strap to your wrist? I imagined that it was more like a really good watch - primarily there to tell the time, but allowing you to use it as a phone when that would otherwise be inconvenient.

I played around with a prototype of an Android watch, and it just seemed too small to be useful. It seems like a remote control to a smartphone would be more useful - something that vibrated when I get a notification, and could send commands to Siri.

It is a remote control to your smartphone - the current Wear crop don't handle any of the phones' tasks, and it vibrates when I get a notification or phonecall...

So, for example, I could tell my phone to notify the watch when I receive a call or text message from my wife? Then when she calls, the watch vibrates.

Would that be expensive from a power consumption perspective? I know next to nothing about hardware, so perhaps I'm being naive.

Well, at the minute, it vibrates when anyone calls or texts, all Wear is is a little screen showing Android's notification system and replicating the alert structure on your device already (e.g. when I get an email, it sits in the notification bar on my phone, but I chose not to vibrate, and on Wear is opens a notification, but doesn't vibrate. Whereas for a text it vibrates on my phone, and so it vibrates the watch as well. Doesn't have sounds, so the watch doesn't ring). It does cost battery life, hence the discussion surrounding it elsewhere in the post.

I agree that battery life is the killer feature that all these watches are missing. I can also see that Google, Samsung, LG, and Motorola are trying to hype the watches like there's no tomorrow.

I really think that the center of the universe for all these devices is the phone and that the watch is really a phone accessory.

Are these watches water resistant/proof?

Most of them are in completely sealed cases with no openings at all (they charge via induction). They're at the very least rainproof and likely would survive for a while under shallow water (depends on pressure, etc).

Smartphones suffer because of the holes (e.g. headphone jack, micro-USB port, button border, etc).

It also depends what features do you expect from the watch. I have a Pebble. It does everything I want on a "smart" watch, and the battery lasts from 7 to 10 days. Which is obviously worst than a year, but it's good enough that it doesn't become a PITA for me.

I don't have one but I remember with my last smartphone (years ago), the battery lasted at least 3 days and I was able to make it last more than a week without any issue. I found out that if I didn't charge it everyday, I would often forget to do it. I had a cable to charge it at work because I forgot too often at first. I started charging it everyday and when I bought the Galaxy Nexus, I had no issue with the awful battery life. I would still like if it lasted more than 2 days, just in case.

If the reviews on the Moto 360 aren't too bad and the battery last at least 2 days, I will probably buy it.

For me smart watches currently seem like tablets before the iPad. There's something not quite right about them but it's hard to pinpoint. I'm hoping that Apple is going to come along and fix that next week. Being their first new product category in 4 years I'm guessing than they've spent a lot longer working on it that LG/Motorola have. Of course I could be completely wrong.

> smart watches currently seem like tablets before the iPad. There's something not quite right about them but it's hard to pinpoint. I'm hoping that Apple is going to come along and fix that next week.

Paste an Apple logo sticker on it if that makes you feel better...

Ah, a troll. Nice to meet you.

In case you aren't a troll (in which case I'm sorry, my mistake) and are just ignorant let me remind you about tablets before the iPad. They were big, bulky, plastic. Ran Windows (not touch optimised). Required a stylus. There was little to no custom software for them. They were expensive. And nobody bought them because they sucked. Then the iPad came along - good software, good hardware, affordable price.

Smart watches seem the same to me so far. For something you wear - a fashion accessory - they all look terrible. Even the Moto 360 (which is by far the best looking) doesn't look great. Apart from the Moto 360 all of them have managed to have horrible watch face designs. Moto are the only ones that look decent. The functionality is ok but not great. Not $250 great. Not enough to make me want to strap something ugly to my body.

Apple could screw up and produce a piece of crap nobody wants. But my guess is that they will come out with something vastly better and every single smart watch manufacturer will have copied them within 6-12 months.

I feel the same way, but I'll probably buy the 360 anyway. Still debating it with myself. Oddly enough my main issue is the size. I don't want to broadcast, "Look at this nerd" by wearing a huge bulky screen on my wrist. I figure Google is really on Wear 1.0 and the next update is going to address a lot of concerns, especially in regards to battery life. This is still early adopter territory.

My concern is that Apple has the ecosystem to do something dramatic that Androidland simply can't catch up to quickly. I know Apple has been down on the Qi charger system, but they never really talk about wireless charging. In my mind wireless charging and wearables go hand-in-hand. Imagine if your next phone had witricity built-in. It would charge your wearables all day. The battery on your wearable would need to be just big enough to handle occasional disconnects from your phone. Now you've solved the battery problem. Sure, your phone will discharge faster but Apple can add a slightly fatter battery to make up for it.

Meanwhile, the Android guys are all trying to figure out how the heck to build things with strong enough batteries.

Just speculation, but I'm afraid that someone with a clever enough gamechanger is going to rule smartwatches. The first iphone's ultra-smooth OS and touch-screen only really made my Treo look like crap. I'm expecting something on this level here. My best guess is that the Apple device will be ultra simplistic like the Pebble with similar battery life while the Android guys are stuck with Google's wearable vision of yet another smartphone-like device on your wrist. The latter might just not be feasible at this generation of technology. It also doesn't help that Motorola chose an older SoC at a process that will use more energy than the latest SoC's.

My gut feeling is that this thing is like buying the G1. Lots of promise, but you're better off waiting until the next attempt.

Am I the only one who felt like he refused to acknowledge this might be a bad product? The Verge has been gushing over this watch for months now and when they finally get it they have the same faults with it as other Android Wear devices. Yet for some reason because it's round and stylish (I beg to differ) it's immediately a better product?

It's odd that they talk about other smart watch competitors except for the open sourced one.

It wasn't just because it was round and stylish. It was because for the first time the reviewer believed that it felt like an actual watch. That is: discreet and unobtrusive. Those come from a device "feeling" different than another. Not just because of specs on a page.

That's enough to warrant a 2 point bump over the other Android Wear devices? They gave the G Watch and Gear a 6.8, and a 8.1 to the Moto 360, yet they have very similar flaws. The focus, as evident by their wrap up, is all about design.

You do understand that watches are for a significant amount of people a fashion accessory ? Design is at least if not more important than functionality.

And as someone who cares about how they look design is the only reason I pick which watch to buy.

I completely get that, but we're talking about something that is $250 and supposed to bring a benefit to your life. If it's offering no additional benefit beyond the other devices other than looking nice, does it warrant such high praise? I personally don't think so. You're letting a poor product slide just because of it looking nice.

We're letting a poor product slide because it is groundbreaking. The Moto 360 has pushed the whole Smartwatch world forward by it simply existing, we now have circular watches which are barely bigger than a traditional clockwork watch, that's a big freaking deal (running Android with an LCD screen no less).

Will I buy the Moto 360? No. The battery issues are not something I am willing to put up with, and frankly I think eInk is a better watch technology than LCD displays for that reason. But I cannot ignore how big this product is. It is HUGE, it is the iPhone of the Smartwatch world.

> It is HUGE, it is the iPhone of the Smartwatch world.

Can you please elaborate further here because I'm just not getting this comparison. The difference between the iPhone and other smartphones at the time had everything to do with how well Apple pulled off the display and touch abilities. The literally only thing different with this over other devices right now is that it is round, and LG has one coming very soon that is also round.

The Verge has always been a Google sounding board. Anything Google tends to get very high reviews.

Pebble lasts 5 days. I like the look better too. Plus it seems simple, and I like the screen in sunlight better.

Plus it works with iOS AND Android - which is good, since I'm a multiplatform kind of person.

My pebble lasts between 7 and 10 days. You must be getting a lot of notifications; do you enable accelerometer-triggered backlight? Do you listen to music often (with the music controls) ?

I get a pretty good number of notifications per day, and my pebble only lasts about 3-4 days.

A lot of it depends on the watchface. One that updates every second (like a ticker) is going to drain a lot faster than one that only displays minutes.

I have a Pebble and I'm quite ready to upgrade to a 360. Google Now is the secret killer feature that reviewers don't take into account — probably because they've only had the device for a day and are in plugged into Apple services instead anyway.

My two caveats are battery life and wrist straps. The early reviews suggest about 12 hrs battery life which is the bare minimum I'm willing to accept. I don't mind charging it every night for the increased functionality over my Pebble. The one disappointment is the lack of steel bands at launch. I'd prefer to get that now from Moto instead of paying extra when it's released later this fall. Despite those issues, I'm buying one today.

>> "Google Now is the secret killer feature that reviewers don't take into account"

I love the promise of Google Now and it's the reason I switch to my Android phone every now and then to see how it's going. But it isn't as good as advertised. The only thing that it is very good with is sports (upcoming games, results, live scores). Everything else is hit or miss and when you're supposed to forget everything else and rely on it that's just not good enough. I wish it was everything it promised because I love the idea but I've found it lacking.

I've found the traffic warning notifications extremely useful, they've given me prior warning of heavy traffic on plenty of occasions and saved me countless hours of sitting in traffic jams. I've been extremely happy with how integrated they've become into my daily routine.

I've also got the email integration turned on and I've been impressed with the integration with ticketmaster. It knew that I was going to see a concert, knew how long it would take to get there for its start time and knew how long it would take to get home.

>> "I switch to my Android phone every now and then"

Do you use Google's services? If you don't, Google Now won't be as 'good as advertised' because it relies on that data which may not seem obvious at first (by the way, Windows Phone's Cortana is much better at requesting and displaying the background data it needs; Microsoft has leap frogged Google and Apple already).

I use Google Mail, Maps and, most importantly, Calendar. I've opted to share the information from those services with Google Now. I've found it's very reliable and useful.

I do.

Now is ok, but can be slightly odd. Like, a card will flash up on my watch mid-morning giving me directions and time to home. Or details of a football game three days in advance, which is cool, and I dismiss it, but it doesn't come back on the day etc.

Not even a day of battery life - that's such a deal breaker for me :(

Form over function? They made something that looks elegant without considering how people use watches. As the reviewer mentioned, you forget about it, it just becomes something you use adhoc during the day. Adhoc has to last 24+ hours.

Could they not have made it thicker just to increase the battery size and make that a selling point?

From a design point of view, you could then have made a chunky watch component that could then sit inside a chunky colourful wrist strap and housing.

I really cannot see the point in a watch with a 12 hour battery life.

I am pretty sure they have considered it. But you can only make it so thick, before people won't buy it purely because of the thickness. Even in the current form, if you look on Engadget comments, 90% of people complain about how thick it is. There is only so much you can achieve using current battery technology, and they have decided that 12h battery life will have to suffice.

> Form over function? They made something that looks elegant without considering how people use watches.

But people use watches as a fashion item. Form is very important in a smartwatch - the previously released Wear devices were criticized for looking geeky and non-watchlike. Having a smartwatch look like a regular watch is a big deal, and the very reason why this one gets praised and the others received mixed responses.

The square interface on the round watch is pretty weird. I didn't expect to see square interface elements being lopped off the sides. The software seems to be almost a complete afterthought, I would have expected at least some innovative ways of making rounder interfaces.

True. I thought Google made a big deal about Android Wear working on round watch faces too.

12 hours is the reported life, but I bet that's with constantly fiddling with it. The device's battery life is probably proportional to how often the screen is kept on and CPU fully awake.

In real world usage, after the initial geek factor expires, the device will probably last longer. I've certainly had that experience with the other Android Wear watches and Google Glass.

I'd also expect the upgrade to Android L to improve battery life.

> The device's battery life is probably proportional to how often the screen is kept on

I would expect a smartwatch's display to always be "on", displaying a watch face.

It won't be. You have to tap it to display the watch face.

Edit: Nope, I am wrong - the screen does indeed stay on all the time, sorry.

In that case I'll stick with the Pebble for the moment. That manages several days with the watch face constantly on.

From what I gather, it is always on. Do you have a citation to the contrary?

"Like both already-released Android Wear watches, Moto 360 will feature an always-on screen, which is a power-saving dimmed display that still tells the time like a traditional watch." - http://www.techradar.com/news/portable-devices/moto-360-rele...

Maybe it is not always on after all:

"One of the cool things about Android Wear smartwatches so far has been the always-on dimmed mode, so you can always flip up and see what time it is. The Moto 360, however, doesn't roll that way. When the screen's not on, the screen's not on. The one exception is when it's on the dock, charging." - http://www.androidcentral.com/moto-360-hands-redux

I thought Android Wear devices had some sort of gesture detection so that the screen only turns on when you move it towards your face?

That's on top of the dimmed display. It runs in the dimmed power save mode, but when you "flick" the watch towards you (slightly exaggerated movement compared to a normal glance at a watch) it turns up and accepts voice commands (at least on the G).

My Pebble battery life went through the roof a few weeks after I got it, when I stopped loading all new apps several times a day and fiddling with it. Once I found apps I liked and settled into a routine, it went from 1 day to 5 days.

I don't care. I am never wearing a watch again. The only stuff I want on me are clothes and jewellery. Clothes to keep the cold and wet and dirt off; jewellery as non-functional art pieces that speak to me in some way and say something about myself to others.

I don't want to have any piece of electronic technology tethered to any part of my body unless one day (God forbid) I'm forced to wear a pace-maker. I was never as happy as when I lost my last watch years and years ago and realised I didn't have to actually get another.

Aren't watches (also) amazing pieces of jewellery?

I see what you're saying and I'm not trying to come across like some kind of luddite (I likes me tech I tells ya) but I only want the jewellery I have on me to have aesthetic function only. Even the incredibly handy function of telling the time is one function too many.

And smartwatches? I don't get them. Don't you need your smartphone nearby, don't they work over bluetooth? So if your phone is in your pocket or somewhere nearby then aren't you paying an awful lot of money for a few seconds of convenience? If they work over wifi or cellular data that's another story of course.

But you can pretty much ignore the time-telling functionality (I guess that's what most people do, anyway) and still retain the aesthetical value. Of course, watches might not be your thing, but it just sounded a little strange - do you value jewellery and its aesthetical value only until they have some sort of functionality?

P.S. I don't get smartwatches, too. At least, in their current incarnation(s).

A colleague of mine purchased a Samsung Gear 2. I think it took about 2 days before it was discarded. He said it was awkward doing business in a display like that when the phone was in your pocket anyway. I suspect the same is true with this: it has initial appeal but lacks practicality and genuine use cases.

I myself, after owning everything from a Timex DataLink, Fossil Wrist PDA, through a TI EZ430 to an expensive Omega, settled on watch perfection: £7 Casio F-91W.

Why would you do business on your WATCH? The purpose is to propagate notification in a non-intrusive manner, not being a phone replacement.

Sorry: "doing business" means accepting calls, changing music, getting a glance at the state of things etc.

It's supposed to augment the phone but fails to do so according to him.

Be careful displaying your Casio F-91W if you visit an Arab country.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Claimed_use_in_terr...

Cheap casio watches are used as bomb timers because they are ubiquitous. Any market stall selling watches in almost any country in the world will have a Casio F-91W or a clone of it. If you wore a cheap Casio watch in an Arab country nobody would think anything of it because everyone else is also wearing them.

Terrorists often wear boots, but wearing boots does not make one a terrorist.

The fact they're ubiquitous hasn't stopped them from being used as evidence that people are terrorists, unfortunately.

Another F-91W user here. Battery life is currently 13 months without a single charge. Does everything a watch needs to, including telling the time!

Seriously, I can just about see Apple doing something with such impractical battery life, but that software?

This thing looks like a complete failure of integrated design, with the hardware being considered in isolation from what the software on it actually does. That it is supposedly the best smartwatch is really quite damning.

Is there a way to charge this thing without the dock, or are you expected to carry that around with you?

Carry the G Watch cradle in my rucksack. Get about 36-44 hours on a charge, so not enough to do a charge once every two days, but enough that you're probably going to get the hour or so near a socket to do it.

Edit: I don't use the voice features all the time (you do feel like a bit of a berk unless you're on your own), and I don't get hundreds of phonecalls and texts setting off the vibrate.

This Android Central article says that it can use a standard Qi charger: http://www.androidcentral.com/moto-360-hands-redux

I really hope Apple decides to call the iWatch something, anything really, that doesn't have the word "watch" in it. It's going to typecast it as something it's not, which is a time-telling device. That's really the most uninteresting and elementary functionality that these watches are going to provide. I really want to wear something that tracks heart rate, blood pressure, room temperature, sleeping habbits, etc. Telling time is the last on the list of shit I care that these things can do.

Did you say the same about the iPhone?

Is NTP handled differently when Android is wearable? If not, I can imagine some will find the accuracy of the time lacking.

What exactly would be wrong with Android time accuracy?

I've seen it drift more than 30 seconds over a few weeks. (Not sure if this is true of 4.4, say.)

I've seen it not drift for any seconds on 20+ devices we have for development testing.

I have seen networks send wrong time to the phones which caused wrong time issues on phones with "sync time with network" enabled.

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