The smartwatch game is like baseball these days, everyone is coming up to the plate to have a swing to see where it goes. Over the weekend the Moto 360 had it’s swing and missed among some reviewers. Tomorrow the Apple iWatch will have its turn at bat, although there will likely be no hardware to review until early 2015.
The Moto 360 is one of the most highly anticipated smartwatches of 2014. All of the renders and prototypes that we had seen pointed to a beautifully designed watch running a modified Android operating system. So it was a bit discouraging to see the first reviews hit the web. Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica writes:
The sad news is that, while the company mostly nailed the exterior design, Motorola totally dropped the ball when it comes to the internal components. Somehow, it managed to dig up a batch of crusty old OMAP 3 SoCs for its flagship watch. The 2010-era processor is old, slow, inefficient, and power hungry. Couple that with a 320mAh battery and we get around half the runtime of other Android Wear devices.
We don’t have a review unit here at Techaeris but I agree with Amadeo that the aesthetic design of the Moto 360 is very attractive. Lance Ulanoff from Mashable writes:
What I’m less impressed with is its finicky nature. Moto 360 often lost its connection to the phone, which was always in my pocket, and it was really unhappy if I didn’t connect to a Moto phone. I also couldn’t always tell when the device was connected, so I’d gesture and gesture with no indication as to what was going on. And wherever I had to install Android Wear, (including on the brand new Moto X) additional software updates were needed for Google Services and Google Search.
This is not to say the reviews are all bad. There was much they liked about the Moto 360, especially it’s design, but the consensus among the reviews I’ve read is, wait for the next generation. But isn’t that usually how it is with most tech? First generation hardware is ultimately the final beta and bug testing phase usually reserved for hard core early adopters. This could very well be Motorola’s plan as Apple prepares to announce the iWatch. Apple’s wearable isn’t expected until early to mid 2015 (nothing official just speculation) so that gives Motorola time to work out bugs and launch version 2 around the same time. Wearables are just starting to find some legs, things are a bit wobbly at the moment but expect them to stabilize by the end of 2015.
If you’re thinking about buying the Moto 360, I would recommend you read Ron Amadeo’s full review at the link below and also watch The Verge’s video review after the source links. They both offer some different insight that could help you make a decision. What do you think of the Moto 360? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.
[button link=”http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/moto-360-review-beautiful-outside-ugly-inside/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Ars Technica[/button][button link=”http://mashable.com/2014/09/06/motorola-moto-360-review/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Mashable[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
