Gadgetory

hey guys this is Dave - Dee and this is my four-month long-term user view of the Moto 360 now I know you're probably thinking this is a really late review and it kind of is but the first time I actually did this review was in October of last year but it was a really bad video for one but more importantly my thoughts on the Moto 360 at the time were very different from how a lot of other youtubers were portraying it so I just chose not to publish it I just didn't have the balls to go against the grain like that but now that I've used it for four months I feel pretty comfortable to share it with you so yeah here we go the first thing I want to talk about is the design now I'm I like watches I'm not a huge watch guy I don't have you know lots of expensive watches or anything but I like watches and I wear them pretty regularly now I totally understand how everyone's opinion on aesthetics differ but to me when the screen of the Moto 360 is off which it is like 99% of the time I don't think it's a particularly good looking timepiece I mean if you compare the Moto 360 with any of the watches here and keep in mind most of these are like 150 to 200 bucks the Moto 360 looks really dull now when the screen is on it's a whole other story I'm not going to bore you with specs but the screen looks really good for what it's supposed to do it's visible in broad daylight and the automatic brightness adjustment works really well and I find that that round form factor it's it's great it I think it's the way to go for smartwatches and it's pretty responsive to touch now the horizontal bar that flat tire thing like others have mentioned after using it for even a few days you really do stop noticing it there's a lot of cool faces to choose from I actually like the stock Motorola ones a lot but as I'm sure you know by now the screen is a huge battery hog so you basically want to keep this thing off as much as possible let's talk to your ability with an ip67 rating this thing is quite resilient to the elements I've showered with this thing I have gone swimming with it a half-dozen times and with no water damage I really think that for a regular urban life it's gonna be tough to give this thing water damage one thing that kind of bugs me is the fact we love this strap I think it looks pretty cool but it shows we're really quickly I've been through two of them this is my third one but I never installed it because I actually found a rubber strap from clockworks energy than I much prefer I wear my Moto 360 when I'm running or go to the gym just with a heart rate sensor but if you're an active person and you're using your watch then I really recommend getting a rubber strap because leather and sweat don't go that well together I mean just as Ross Geller from friends he'll tell you now I've actually worn this thing to a paintball match once and I got shot right on the screen like this thing Thiessen's traveled like 300 feet per second and it gets it hits so hard that actually felt the impact behind the watch on my wrist and I thought for sure for sure the screen was gonna bust but I know I was wiping the paint off and I was like oh wow it works perfectly and I was I was actually very impressed by that so I think Motorola did a great job on durability I want to talk a little bit about the UI the notification system works reasonably well but if you get a lot of notifications in between checking your watch the UI can get bogged down so if you're a big deal and you suddenly get a bunch of text messages and Twitter notifications YouTube activity and emails and calendar alerts it takes quite a bit of swiping to clear all that stuff off your screen so just to showcase this I didn't clear my notifications for half a day but you can see how the UI can get kind of gnarly when it's full you can send short texts and emails your contacts but I never really enjoyed using it I mean it just felt really clumsy and I honestly have helped door-key sending messages like that the calendar integration is kind of cool some watches have indicators to show upcoming events but I found myself referring to the phone regularly the Google now cards actually work quite well on the watch they fill up your screen properly and all the info there it's basically a smaller version of the cards from your phone there's also a pedometer in there and it seems to work like any other pedometer but I don't use them much so I'm not sure how good this one is you also get some basic app control like the music player on your phone so you can skip to the next track or the previous track and you can also control the volume but for other third-party apps like let's say you have a you know a nest thermostat or something and you want to control it with an app on your phone you actually can't control the app from the watch you have to you just basically use your watch to turn on the app on your phone which is not that cool but I mean again that's just the nature of the watch in its current generation so in terms of functionality there's quite a lot of stuff that works pretty well on the Moto 360 so things like the calendar or time management or just even telling time all that stuff works pretty well anything to do with notifications the Moto 360 can do pretty well but here's the thing the Moto 360 does all of these things pretty well there's something else that does it even better and it's in your pocket your phone every time you get a notification you only see a snippet of it on your watch so you have to refer to your phone to get the full story if you get an email refer to your phone if you get a Twitter refer to your phone if you want to control an app refer to your phone so basically everything that the watch can do your phone can do it better faster and stronger so for me I feel like the usage case is really limited and I think I'm a pretty regular dude with a regular job and I don't have hundreds of thousands of YouTube subs and and Twitter followers and stuff like that so I don't really need my wrist to be vibrating all the time notifying me of all these things the heart rate sensor is pretty cool but I found that the sensor was kind of hit or miss I don't know if it's a hair thing I mean I actually tried shaving a patch of my wrist for better contact and didn't really seem to make a difference but I just don't think the heart rate sensor is super reliable now there is one thing I found on the Moto 360 that I actually liked on the watch more than the phone function and that is the ability to take voice dictated notes so on a phone you pick up your phone and you say okay Google then you have to wait for the tone and then you say take a note to check my applesauce I don't even have applesauce but you get the idea you have to wait for that tone before you can begin your command now with Android wear it actually does voice buffering so you don't have to wait for anything you just say ok Google take a note to check my applesauce it's just so much faster now I'm a pen and paper guy I constantly write notes on pieces of paper throughout the day just to remind me to do things and I found that this function was amazing I found it faster and easier than anything else I've used before and then when you get to a computer or your phone you open up Google keep and there you go there's a list of all the notes you've made I'm sure a lot of you know the Moto 360 doesn't have a very good battery life on average you're gonna get a day of use out of it so they recommend that you recharge it every day now a lot of reviewers have kind of shrugged this off as kind of being like oh you know just deal with it this is the product but to me that's a deal breaker because I mean there's nothing wrong with recharging a device every single day there are things in our lives that we need to recharge every day like our cell phones our notebooks if we use those every day or in the future electric cars these are things that are critical to our life and if we don't recharge on the night before if we get punished for it the next day so it's worth it to be mindful and to remember to recharge it the night before but to me the Moto 360 feels like more of a gadget or an accessory so even after using it for four months I still find it weird and a little annoying to recharge it so often but I have to give it up to Motorola because the charging dock looks really cool and it feels really well executed when you put your watch on and it turns into a clock it also takes about two hours to fully charge up introducing useful tech into our lives is a really good thing but adding techie stuff into our life just for the sake of having more gadgets I mean I think that's a pretty ass-backwards way of doing things when I look at the Moto 360 I think does this make my life easier does it make my life more optimized or more organized does my workflow become more productive and aside from the note taking dictation thing I think the answer to most of those questions is no so why am I wearing it I mean the screen is cool to look at but with the battery drain the way it is I don't I really don't want to look at the screen I think wearables are the future in fact I think smartwatches could replace smart phones if the tech was done right like kind of how the Galaxy gear has tried to do but failed horribly yet but that's the thing this entire product category is very immature still so if you've been drawn to these devices and you're on the fence my opinion is to wait because the Moto 360 was one of the best of the bunch but it's still a really weak offering so I hope you guys enjoyed the review I've got to go check up on some applesauce and yeah it's been nice I'll see you guys next time