Motorola Moto 360 review

Motorola Moto 360 review

Monday, September 8 / No Comments

Normally that’s impossible. My phone is always either in my pocket or in my hands, because missing an email or a text or a killer snap is just entirely unfathomable. But this morning, I was reading an email on my wrist, and walked out the door without even checking my pockets. That's what the Moto 360 has done to me: I already feel naked without it, but I don’t notice my smartphone so much anymore.

The Moto 360 is the smartwatch I’ve been waiting for, the $249 timepiece that promised to be the first Android Wear device I’d actually want to wear. It’s designed to prove that smartwatches don’t have to be ugly. That they can, and must, be beautiful. That a smartwatch should be a watch, and that being a watch is ultimately the only thing that matters.

Motorola has said all the right things for months, but it’s time to put up or shut up. The 360 goes on sale today, and it does so under the watchful eye of the smartwatch industry. Everyone from Apple to Rolex to Swatch is looking on, waiting to see what happens next.

It’s go time.

Motorola never talks about the 360 as a gadget or a technological marvel. It’s not meant to be a computer on your wrist, a smartphone shrunk to a new form factor. It’s a timepiece. A wristwatch. That was the starting point, the founding idea — Motorola came not to create a new category but to evolve an old one.

IT'S NOT A GADGET, IT'S A WATCH
It’s an ambitious goal, and Motorola pulled it off. 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.
There’s an understated elegance to this device. It’s utterly without flash or flair, but it’s classy as can be. Its leather strap, made by Chicago tannery Horween, is high-end and comfortable — and not just compared to the plasticky, rubber straps on other smartwatches. Its round, stainless steel shell (which comes in black or silver) sits neatly on my wrist, without sticking out off the sides of my arm and knocking against my desk or catching on my sleeve. It’s lighter than it looks (just 1.7 ounces), smaller than it looks, more comfortable than it looks. At 11.5mm, it’s a little thick for my taste, but it still feels good on my wrist. It feels like the watches I’ve always worn. It’s tough enough to wear in the shower or get dirty with, and I stopped worrying about it or fidgeting with it as soon as I got it working.

IT'S THE JON HAMM OF SMARTWATCHES

The centerpiece of the 360 is the 1.65-inch display that protrudes ever so slightly from its round shell. It runs almost completely edge to edge, encircled by only the smallest of bezels. The display has terrific viewing angles, and is easily (and surprisingly) viewable outdoors. It's not a perfect circle, though, not quite — there's a small cutout strip of black plastic at the bottom, which houses the device's internals and sensors. It hurts the look a bit, but I hardly notice it anymore.

The screen looks great at a glance, but not under close scrutiny: its 320 x 290 resolution is low enough that you’ll see jagged edges on letters and can easily make out individual pixels, and the beveled edges of the Gorilla Glass give off a sort of shimmering moiré pattern. The edges almost glitter, making everything harder to read and just a little bit dirty looking. (It’s a fingerprint magnet, too, which doesn’t help.) It’s the only thing about the 360 that looks or feels cheap.

For a device you’re not likely to spend a lot of time looking at, this screen does its job fine. But a crisper display that sits flush with the bezel would feel even more immersive, more like a sapphire wristwatch. Motorola loves to talk about what an engineering accomplishment the round screen is, but there’s work left to be done.

Round is hard, though, and not just for Motorola. Google may technically support round displays with Android Wear, but the 360 provides constant confirmation that this operating system was designed with rectangles in mind. Scrolling through a list will often cut off titles and images; sometimes list items get kicked way down to the bottom of the screen for no apparent reason. As with the display, there’s nothing necessarily broken here; these are just small cracks in the armor that keep the 360 from feeling truly like a perfect, polished device.

There’s not much Motorola can do about it, either. For all its hardware prowess, the Moto 360 is functionally just like every other Android Wear device. This is Google’s platform, and it controls it tightly. That makes the 360, at its most basic, just a much more attractive way to see all the same notifications on your phone. New emails, texts, calls, tweets, weather information — everything pops up on your watch. In many cases, there’s also an easy way to respond without ever taking your phone out of your pocket. You can also perform basic Google searches, set reminders, take notes, and get quick directions to the nearest Starbucks. Android Wear is the everything inbox, and it’s the same thing no matter which device you’re shouting "Okay Google" at. (I should note, though, that the 360’s voice recognition seems to be even better than the other watches. It has two microphones built in, plus Motorola’s impressive software; it almost never misheard me.)

YOU CAN CHANGE THE HARDWARE, BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANDROID WEAR

A few months in, there’s still really not that much you can do with Android Wear. Whenever I show it to people my demo almost always either ends in ten seconds ("look at all the watchfaces!") or involves me forcing someone to text me so I can respond from my wrist. There’s a heart rate monitor and a pedometer inside the 360, but neither are terribly accurate, and they feel like only a gesture in the direction of how powerful a fitness device a smartwatch could be. Runtastic’s Android Wear app is handy, too, letting you start and track a workout from your wrist, but it's not very powerful yet.

But that’s exactly the point: the Moto 360 isn’t meant to be used all the time. It’s meant to be a delightful and occasional source of useful information, reminding you at the perfect moment of the thing you forgot. You’re not supposed to ask Android Wear what’s next on your calendar; you’re supposed to trust that it’ll tell you when you need to know. And that it’ll direct you there when it’s time to go. All you have to do is say "Okay Google, call a car."

That’s why smartwatch hardware is so important. Most of the time you won't be using the Moto 360, yet it’s always visible. When it’s just hanging on your wrist, it better look and feel good. That's what Motorola is getting at: the Moto 360 isn’t something completely new, something you’ll use for hours at a time like a phone or tablet. It’s a watch. You flick your wrist, check it, and go back to your life. This watch just happens to do more than tell time.

MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, YOU WON'T BE USING A SMARTWATCH — SO IT BETTER LOOK GOOD

Until, that is, it doesn’t do anything at all. That happens about 12 hours after I take the watch off its charger, a cool black wireless dock that the 360 slots into sideways. Motorola says the 360’s battery lasts a day, but I haven’t seen it last that long yet. I don’t expect a smartwatch to last weeks or years, but it ought to be able to last a day and a night no matter how much I use it. My watch now dies before my phone does, and that’s unacceptable. I’ve already spent too much time wearing a dead Moto 360, and good-looking a bracelet as it is, that’s not what I’m spending $249 for.

As long as it's charged, the Moto 360 feels different from any of its competitors. In many ways, it feels like the first real smartwatch. Everything before it was a screen on your wrist, a mini-tablet made to bring you easy notifications. Those are a warped evolution of computers, not watches. But the Moto 360 is to a sundial as the iPad is to a stone tablet: it’s the same, only completely different. Better. Swapping my Seiko for a Moto 360 involved zero cognitive effort, no idle touching of my wrist because it feels different now. It just fits.

But the best yet had better not be the best we can do. Motorola needs to figure out how to make the battery better, and how to do it without sacrificing style. It needs to release more straps, more colors, more options. If it wants to play in the watch industry, Motorola needs to offer variety. It needs to not be one-size-fits-all, because one size doesn’t fit all. (There are more leather and metal bands coming, but that's not enough either.) And at some point, some company is going to have to up the smartwatch ante again. It might be Apple, it might be Google, it might even be Motorola. But whether it’s more powerful health features or just better notification management, we’re not even close to fully realizing what a smartwatch can do. We’d better not be.

If you’re buying a smartwatch today, spend $249 and buy the Moto 360. That’s an easy call. But buy it knowing that this is only the beginning, that looking good is only the first step toward being great.

The road ahead is still long for smartwatches, but the future looks better than ever.

Photos by Jordan Oplinger

Motorola Moto 360

8.1VERGE SCORE

GOOD STUFF

• Gorgeous design
• Great voice recognition
• Round is the right form factor
• Nice, interchangeable straps

BAD STUFF

• Frustrating battery life
• Round display causes some software awkwardness

THE BREAKDOWN

More times than not, the Verge score is based on the average of the subscores below. However, since this is a non-weighted average, we reserve the right to tweak the overall score if we feel it doesn't reflect our overall assessment and price of the product. Read more about how we test and rate products.

• DESIGN9
• DISPLAY7
• SOFTWARE7
• PERFORMANCE8
• BATTERY LIFE
• 
  

Meta Watch Meta M1 review Smartwatch

Meta Watch Meta M1 review Smartwatch

Wednesday, September 3 / No Comments

It’s been a busy year for the smartwatch. In just the past few months, we’ve seen numerous smartwatches from Pebble, LG, Motorola, Samsung, and countless companies you’ve probably never heard of. And Apple’s expected to announce a smartwatch of its own in just a week’s time. The ones we've seen so far vary in capabilities, but one constant remains: they are more gadget than watch. I’ve long said that smartwatches look and function too much like “computers on your wrist,” and it’s an apt description for the vast majority of the smartwatches that you can buy today.

Meta Watch, a company born from former Fossil engineers and one of the pioneers of the modern smartwatch movement, claims to buck this trend. Its new Meta M1, which begins shipping today and starts at $249, trades the futuristic gadget fantasy for another, older kind of gadget: the chronograph style watch. It’s still a smartwatch in that it connects to my smartphone via Bluetooth, buzzes my wrist with notifications, and shows me my upcoming calendar appointments. But it’s not the gadget that other smartwatches aspire to be. I can’t bark orders at it with my voice and I can’t turn my smart lights on and off with it. Forget about ordering a pizza with the M1 — it can’t even count my steps as I walk.

Meta Watch’s watch industry pedigree shines through loud and clear with the M1: this is a watchmaker’s smartwatch, not a wrist-worn electronic Swiss Army knife made by the same company that produces your smartphone. That can either be a good or a bad thing; I’ve spent the last two weeks wearing the M1 to find out.

The biggest difference between the M1 and other smartwatches is, well, it doesn’t really look like a smartwatch. Its design recalls a busy analog chronograph, with more buttons and details in one small area than should really be there. It’s certainly polarizing, most people either love it or hate it, but it’s not unlike many traditional chronographs in that respect. Think modern Tag Heuer, not vintage Dieter Rams Braun. For what it’s worth, the design has grown on me, and I think it looks a lot better when worn on a wrist than when sitting on a desk.

The M1’s premium materials are really what set it apart from the rest of the smartwatch field: even the base model has an all-metal body with a substantial weight that feels much nicer than plastic smartwatches like LG’s G Watch or Samsung’s Gear line. The $249 model has a natural rubber band (scented with vanilla, so it "doesn’t smell like a used tire") available in an assortment of colors. If you’re willing to spend a little more, you can get leather or steel band options (there are eight different configurations in total). My gold-and-blue review unit has a thick, stiff leather band that takes a day or so of wear to break in, but it’s clearly of a much higher-quality leather than you get on a cheap wristwatch.PREMIUM MATERIALS SET THE M1 APART

The M1 unique armature system is supposed to make the rectangular watch conform better to your wrist and was designed by Frank Nuovo, formerly of Vertu. The watch’s buttons are integrated into the hinges of the armatures and control the various functions of the watch (there’s no touchscreen on the M1’s black-and-white digital display). There’s a charging port on the bottom and the Micro USB charging connector smartly snaps to the back of the watch with a magnet. It’s a comfortable watch to wear, and if you’re used to wearing an analog watch, you likely won’t notice its weight.

The display is a black-and-white rectangular screen, similar in size and resolution to the Pebble’s display. It’s easy to read outdoors and is always on, so I didn’t have to shake my wrist or press a button to quickly check the time. It’s noticeably pixelated, and doesn’t compare to the high resolution displays on today’s smartphones, but it’s easily read with just a glance.

Despite using a similar display as the Pebble, the M1 uses a different backlight, and it is terrible. Unlike the Pebble’s even, backlit glow whenever you jiggle your wrist, the M1’s backlight requires a button press to turn on. The light itself is pathetically weak, similar to what digital watches offered two decades ago before Timex changed the game with Indiglo. For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t work, failing to illuminate the screen and making the watch all but impossible to read in the dark.

Aside from the backlight issues, the hardware experience of the M1 is exactly what Meta Watch is going for. It doesn’t look or feel like a smartwatch, and though I got a couple of odd glances when wearing the blue-and-gold model, nobody stopped me to ask about the computer on my wrist. I could see wearing it with a suit or dressier attire; it's more formal than the straight casual look of the LG G Watch or any Samsung smartwatch.

If you’re considering the M1, the first thing you have to acknowledge is that you’re not buying into the same ecosystem you’d get from Google or Pebble (or, presumably, Apple). Meta Watch doesn’t have an app store and doesn’t plan on launching one any time soon. There isn’t a community of developers building new apps, watch faces, and functions for the M1. That said, if you’re looking for a nice watch, and the M1’s design appeals to you, its smart functions do add a dose of utility to what is otherwise a basic timepiece.

There are eight digital and analog-style watch faces on the M1. The faces are rather traditional — you won’t find an LCARS imitator or a face with your favorite brand or sports team. My preferred analog style face doesn’t include a date indicator, so I do wish Meta offered slightly more control over the faces.

Certain parts of the M1’s software feel incomplete: the music-control screen doesn’t show artist and song information for most music apps on iOS, the timer function doesn’t include a stopwatch, and there is no built-in alarm of any sort. It also has a tendency to reset itself to the default watch face whenever it disconnects from my phone. Further, the font size is too small to read comfortably, which makes it a bit of a chore to read notifications.THE M1 DOESN'T OFFER THE SAME APPS OR ECOSYSTEM AS GOOGLE OR PEBBLE

Fortunately, there is a notification center, which groups all of the incoming alerts sent to your wrist. You can’t actually do anything with the alerts: you have to go back to your phone for that, but it’s convenient to page through them to get an idea of what you recently missed. I like Meta’s approach to notifications, but I do wish there was a way to immediately delete or archive unwanted emails or simultaneously clear notifications from my watch and my phone.

Meta’s companion app, available for iOS 7 and Android 4.3 or newer devices, lets you rearrange the six home screens on the M1 (time, weather, calendar, music, notifications, and timer) and monitor the remaining battery life on the watch. The companion app also gives you control over what notifications will hit your wrist, down to specific apps. For example, you can have something light up your phone’s display, but not buzz your wrist, a nice improvement over the all-or-nothing alerts that Pebble offers on iOS. The same feature is available on Meta’s Android app, and it behaves similarly to the Android Wear app’s notification controls.

Meta Watch says that it has other features planned for the M1, including custom feeds for sports scores and other news information that can be pushed to your wrist or instantly available when you look at your watch.

Since the M1 doesn’t have a color display and isn’t always listening for a voice command, Meta Watch boasts that its battery can last up to a week between charges, longer than the Pebble. My experience with the M1 lines up with Meta’s predictions: I was able to go a full five days between charges, even with the watch connected to my phone and receiving alerts the entire time. Meta Watch tells me that future firmware updates will improve the M1’s battery life even more.

With the M1, Meta Watch’s goal is not to appeal to most people. Rather, the company is going after the traditional watch buyer, the person already wearing one on their wrist and are willing to spend a few hundred dollars on a nice watch that also might have some smarts. Meta is aiming for the Tissot buyer, not the G Watch wearer.

For the most part, the M1 succeeds in that relatively unambitious goal. It has much nicer materials than any other smartwatch I’ve ever used, has a distinctive, if polarizing, design, and is available in a number of different configurations depending on taste and budget. Its smartwatch functions are genuinely useful, and the long battery life means I don’t have to worry about charging it daily.

The M1’s design is not for everyone: it’s unique enough that some people will like it, while many others may hate it. But that’s fine. That’s how the watch industry has always worked: there are thousands of designs from hundreds of different makers, each appealing to a different type of person. The M1 is a watch made by watch people for watch people, and if you’re not a fan of its style or aren’t interested in it as a piece of jewelry, you should look at the litany of other smartwatch options flooding the market.

For me, I could easily see the M1 replacing my day-to-day watch (just not the blue and gold model, I’ll take silver and black or the brown and black model), which is a huge step forward for smartwatches in general. It’s not a do-all gadget with a laundry list of functions: it does a few things and does them relatively well. That’s probably not enough for those seriously thinking about Android Wear watches or eagerly looking forward to what Apple has up its sleeve. But for the rest of the watch wearing world, the M1 is a good watch with a few smart tricks to boot. And that’s all it needs to be.