Gadgetory

so way back in the Stone Age Motorola worked with me very briefly when I did my Moto X and Moto G reviews then they went silent for a bit and frankly I didn't care anyway then the Moto 360 got announced and went holy crap I need to get in touch with Motorola again and apparently so did every other reviewer on the planet because I finally got one a couple of weeks ago just like we finally got the go-ahead to publish our Sennheiser factory tour soon yay and so here are my thoughts on the Moto 360 specifically and Android wear in general I guess the Coolermaster Neptune 240m features an exclusive pump design and their new Silencio fans to provide impressive near silent performance click now to learn more the setup process with the Android wear app is really simple and pairing my phone worked effortlessly but what exactly did I just pair my phone to Hardware rundown time on the inside of the watch you'll find 512 Meg's of RAM four gigs of storage Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy a pedometer and heart rate monitor dual microphones a vibration motor a three hundred and twenty milliamp hour battery that supports wireless charging with the included duct and finally and this has been the source of much discussion about this device even though it doesn't seem to have a performance impact a Texas Instruments TI OMAP 3630 processor which is a four-year-old CPU design built on a 45 nanometer manufacturing process so the speculation is that Motorola could have potentially extended battery life with something a little bit newer onto the outside I've got the stone whore Wien leather band online which i think is pretentious hipster for not waterproof but very lightweight and comfortable dyed cowhide but if you don't like leather that it's available in a variety of well ok there's a different color of leather but also it's available with metal bands although the tinkers among you may want to pick up the leather model anyway and then a pebble metal band for 30 bucks they're actually compatible and you can do the swap yourself if you're a little bit handy the watch body itself is ip67 water and dust proof something you can learn more about here if you feel like it and features a heart rate monitor on the bottom a state the steel housing around the round watch face with a microphone port on the left and the watch's lone physical button on the right then finally the main event a 1.5 6-inch 320 by 290 backlit LCD touchscreen display covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 3 I think this is a good opportunity to say I was really impressed with the watch's ruggedness overall I'm pretty careless and in spite of me wearing it every day for two weeks the Moto 360 you see in our close-up footage is in basically perfect condition excellent considering that this is what my daily driver watches tend to end up looking like even if they have Gorilla Glass the display is good its 205 pixel per inch pixel density is noticeably non-retina but not enough to be normally distracting in day to day use and viewing angles are very good with full brightness and a watch face with high contrast between colors but in ambient mode when the display is on but dim you will need to look at it a bit more directly what is ambient mode you might ask well instead of just having the display off or max brightness with a very deliberate motion gesture required to wake it up and the mode is much more loosey-goosey about waking up when you gesture more casually and then it stays on I'll be at a lower brightness for longer after activation allowing you to use the watch more naturally you know tilt it toward yourself on the couch use it while lying on your back you know pull up your sleeve before checking it and lots of other stuff that doesn't normally work very well in the regular mode if you're using ambient mode you can probably still get through a full day on the battery but it's much tighter and you can basically forget about using a lot of the Android wear functionality that's being added like running apps or even games directly on the watch oh yeah Linus Android wear how is that anyway honestly right now pretty buggy thankfully there were no outright crashes or anything but while none of this stuff happened consistently enough for me to reproduce it on camera here are some irritating bugs I've encountered over the last couple of weeks in no particular order refusing to take voice commands while running turn-by-turn navigation failing to display incoming calls on the watch even though I can clearly see they're coming in on the phone and they are connected switching to a playlist of the ringtones on my phone when I receive a text message while listening to Google play music over a Bluetooth headset displaying gobbledygook instead of proper characters in place of weather and date data and the list just goes on and at times honestly the stuff that did work correctly wasn't a lot better thought out if I get text messages from two different people in between checking and responding to them not only can I not do useful things like respond with voice or marques read I can't even read them hangouts handles this much better with swipes to the right opening the message that you start your swipe on but not everyone likes hangouts Google and another great example of this broken functionality is Twitter direct messages and mentions just pile up with the only option being open on phone there I also dislike the way information gets managed sometimes music control is one of those situations where if I'm listening to music I probably want the control of it at my fingertips and it'll get buried under other cards as new notifications roll in another is if I'm on a call it would be nice if there was a notification card for it I can accept a call with the watch but I can't terminate it I mean what if I used my watch to take the call because I was planning to use a speakerphone like if I'm driving or a wired headset if I have to take the phone out of my pocket to hang up then the watch is very purpose of me not needing to take out my phone was defeated there is really great stuff too though reading hold emails instead of being stuck with previews like the pebble is almost a switchable advantage in and of itself Google now voice recognition worked great for me indicating solid integrated mics Dropcam notifications complete with a snapshot of what's going on are awesome for checking on the baby and discovering that I could have my turn-by-turn navigation on my wrist was another almost switchable moment for me and probably a lot of people who don't have car mounts for their phones and that's just that's just the tip of what Android wear will be able to do in the future and you can already get cool stuff like third party watch face managers I used face er which you can use to download and create new watch faces to augment the utterly anemic stock selection although I have to say it is appalling to me that you even need a workaround with a third party tool for this but I digress and then there are other useful apps including the usual SmartWatch you know ring my phone buzz me if I go out of range and health tracker stuff but also you know some Android II stuff in there like custom launchers which you can learn about here calculators a Google keep integration a network status change notifier a screen lock or so errant water drops don't fire up Google now all the time if you're in the shower for example and even this super handy spin-the-bottle app if you happen to be a daring adolescent okay that one's not that useful but at the point is we're going to see more in the future so bottom line though is it awesome Linus are you ready to abandon your pebble steel for Android wear the answer is unfortunately no part of this is the hardware I continue to believe in the importance of multi day batteries for mobile devices even though the convenient wireless charging dock takes some of the sting out but the biggest part of the problem here for me is software smart phones won me over to single day batteries by giving me doodles of functionality that my old flip couldn't and while being able to run apps in the background on a watch something that pebble can't do opens up a whole new world of possibilities I would still personally hold off a little bit more until Android wear continues to mature because it will mature I can already see it's going to be awesome this isn't like the last time the industry tried to tack extra functionality onto what is classically just a timepiece and a fashion statement speaking of extra functionality our friends over at the board have some pretty sweet deals going on for a very limited time just head over to Z board shop calm slash Linus to save up to $300 on various editions of the Z board I got a chance to check out the San Francisco special edition of the Z board back in July and you can watch my review video of it here spoiler alert it's badass and actually improved since then as well the board itself is thinner and lighter making it even easier to commute with and start your destination and they have a new urethane wheel upgrade available that increases both the top speed and the range of the board on a battery charge very significantly pretty amazing stuff they've got deals on all three versions of the board as well as the wheel and LED upgrade so you can properly kid out your board for optimal visibility and efficiency so head over to the forum post link in the video description where you can get the full details for all the Z board details deal deals I said almost said details again but I think I recovered pretty well I bet most of you didn't even notice that they're offering as well as the full details on the giveaway that they're running for one of each model of the board it's a great product I use mine all the time these are great deals and they're also just genuinely nice folks over there so be sure to check it out other things to check out guys are the 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