Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm Kim PhD here and what you're looking at is one of the most highly anticipated devices of 2014 this SmartWatch is the Moto 360 now there are a lot of varying opinions on smartwatches in general as a category but this 360 is one of the most important ones and it starts right off with the name Moto 360 it's a circular shell 360 degrees all around well not quite 360 there's actually a small bezel at the bottom that just cuts off a bit of the display but other than that it's essentially a circle now some people hate this little bar at the bottom they say it's distracting and it's a design flaw and even a deal-breaker but I found that a lot of people saying this haven't actually used the watch pass just looking at it for a little bit and I found that your eye really starts ignoring it when you get to use a watch for a bit and I really hardly notice anymore even though obviously it's still there so for the record this little bar is kind of necessary for Motorola to achieve this design behind it are the display drivers and digitizer and the ambient light sensor which have to go somewhere and in all other smartwatches we've seen it's in the form of a thicker bezel and personally I'll take this thin profile with the bottom bar any day so the result of this design decision is a beautiful watch it's made of metal all around its ip67 certified it's really well constructed so dust and water resistant so no worries in the rain and the thing is not nearly as heavy as it looks I know it's made of metal but all the electronics inside are pretty light and it's a leather band the metal ones are coming later for about $80 extra so this one overall is pretty light at 49 grams so it's actually very manageable now the thing is the size on your wrist thing is very polarizing so I found for a lot of people you know I gave it to my mom who has pretty similar sized wrists to me thin I guess and her immediate reaction was okay this is way too big to wear watch I'm not going to wear this but you give it to someone like my buddy Lou from unbox therapy who wears a relatively massive g-shock watch all the time on a much larger wrist switching to a moto 360 makes it look tiny so dainty and unacceptably small so it's something you got to get used to for sure it's a 1.5 6-inch display I know I'm not coming from wearing any watch previously so it feels pretty comfortable on my wrist I got used to it pretty fast but there are no to size options like the Apple watch so you'll have to make this one work also this is the black version there's also a silver version as well and yes if you wear it out enough you will get asked if it's an Apple watch actually you can put an Apple watch homescreen on the 360 and it has a functioning clock and everything which is pretty funny I'll leave a link to that below so the only underwhelming part of the watch's Hardware is the display it's ok it's 1.5 6 inches diagonally as a circle and has this beveled edge around the circumference of the Gorilla Glass and it looks interesting I guess but it might have looked even cooler with this seamless edge and the resolution is 320 by 2 90 so not a very high pixel density at all you can easily see the pixels if you look for them I guess but the good thing is that it's an IPS display which means it's pretty visible outdoors it's much brighter than if they'd use an OLED display so in pretty much all but direct sunlight you can see this thing clearly much more so than if they'd use OLED so I'm happy with their choice so the software on the Moto 360 is the same as other smartwatches like we've seen in the LG G watch and Samsung gear live it's Android wear 1.0 and I'm actually I've covered Android wear much more in depth in a separate video I'll leave that link right below that like button so you can check it out it's essentially your Android phones notifications and Google now cards on your wrist now this is a bit different because it's a circular display of course so you have Motorola circular watch faces and a lot of round elements in Android wear that really just look better on a circular display the thing is there are also parts of Android wear that look better on a square display so sometimes notifications text will get cut off a little bit in the corners when you're trying to scroll up and read them I mean usually it does a pretty good job of not cutting off any of the graphics but it's not flawless and I feel like maybe we could see a split down the road of Android wear for round displays and Android wear for square displays as much as that would suck now the number one thing people have asked the most about with the Moto 360 is the battery life so here's a scoop on the battery of the Moto 360 the TLDR is it's ok it's not bad but it's definitely not great so it's a 300 or 320 million power battery depending on who you want to believe and it's a pretty large screen one point five six inches compared to the battery size and for that reason every single minute of screen on time you have what these watches counts a lot now a lot of people have been reviewing this watch have been using it a lot oh I got to test it a lot I got to make sure I get the battery life checked out and when you use it a lot in fact more than average you're going to take a massive hit to the battery now I think I get more notifications than the average person I get plenty of Twitter notifications Google+ notifications Gmail stuff I have pretty much everything turned on so I get calendar stuff tasks all these reminders all day so it's going off and it's working the way I guess a normal SmartWatch should and I tend to end the day with around 30 percent to 20 percent battery remaining on a heavier day when I'm turning the screen on more when I'm using Google Maps Navigation directions on here when I'm checking my heart rate when I'm checking my steps when I'm using all these ok Google commands and turning the screen on over and over again is listening to my voice a lot and the screen is on a lot and those days I'll end with maybe 10 percent battery left or less but my day goes from 7 or 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next morning so if you can bear with it lasting 17 18 19 hours before you have to charge it again overnight then that's fine you'll charge it every night now a big factor in this is whether or not you have ambient mode on the difference between ambient mode on and off is when ambient mode is off you check the screen it'll show you the time and after a few seconds it'll disappear and the screen turns back off again and it's pretty sensitive in terms of knowing when you bring it up to your face obviously you can't really sort of glance check it because it doesn't really know when you're bringing it up to your face or not but when you very deliberately look at the watch it clearly turns the face on and you can check the time and your notifications before it turns off a few seconds later if you turn ambient mode off and it warns you when you do this that this will take a massive hit on battery life but when you turn this off it'll leave the screen on but dimly on forever indefinitely so that's a lot more screen on time and if you leave ambient mode on you will not get nearly as much battery life as you would if it was off default out of the box ambient mode is off and I think that's recommended I wouldn't really suggest leaving the clockface on especially because it's so dim you won't really be able to see it anyway so you might as well have the face off and save battery I say leave ambient mode off you'll get a full day but if you turn ambient mode on you will not get a full day the one really nice thing about the battery though is because it's so small it charges really fast so if you get home at the end of a workday you're going to go out that night and you throw it on the charger for half an hour you can get a lot back into the battery and easily have enough to go for the rest of the night and the next thing is the charging mechanism is pretty awesome it is officially qi wireless charging so you can use any old wireless charger you have maybe your nexus one lying around which is great but the dock it comes with and the retail packaging is sweet you put it on the dock it glows very dimly with the time and your battery percentage remaining which makes for a nice alarm clock and it looks cool as hell on a desk I'm a fan of the charging so I did mention the ambient light sensor is in that bottom bar that's one of several ways to use the watch when ambient mode is turned off you can number one press the power button on the side to wake the display number two you can tap the display anywhere to wake it up I found myself actually doing that way the most often and then number three you can raise the watch up to your face and the gyroscope will detect that you've raised it and it'll light up the display and then you have the ambient light sensor which is what you can use to just cover the face of the watch for a second and that will dim the display for you when you're done looking at it so here's something weird about the SmartWatch performance is very hit-or-miss sometimes and this key word is sometimes it's flawless you know super smooth never hiccups and is totally fine but other times and it's like 50/50 all the times it's really stuttery and drops frames and lags and is janky and yes it is new software Android wear 1.0 and it's not even a high end chip it's a TI OMAP 3 but it really makes me wonder what would have happened if they went with a higher resolution display most of the performance problems I'm seeing with the Moto 360 happen right when I turn the screen on for the first time makes me think that there's some throttling going on when the screen is off to save some battery so that as soon as the screen turns on and if I try doing action too quickly the processor hasn't throttled back up yet and it's still kind of in this dormant mode and that's why I'm seeing lots of choppiness and lots and lots of dropped frames the animations are all there it just takes a second before they kick in and smooth themselves out which seems like a problem with the hardware more than the software but again this is also first generation Android where software so it's probably a little bit of both so the summary of it right now for the Moto 360 is really the summary for smartwatches general smartwatches as a whole are not ready for primetime they're not like a full complete compelling package for the majority of people yet that being said this is the best one you can get the Moto 360 is the best SmartWatch you can get in my opinion I've used a bunch of them I'll continue to use more of them and test more of them I want to check out the LG G watch our I want to check out the Apple watch so there are some other things I want to test but this is the best one I've used by a little bit if you're willing to go form over function meaning you like the way it looks enough to deal with the fact that there are some performance issues and you have to charge it every night and it only works with Android phones if you like the way it looks enough to deal with all that then this is great this is an awesome SmartWatch and I wouldn't blame you for buying it it's $250 it's not cheap but it's also not the most expensive SmartWatch out there either I will continue to wear mine because I want to see where Android wear moves in these next few weeks and months there are some updates coming out and I know that the Moto 360 will basically be first in line for those and assuming that these software updates are good and they optimize battery life and they take care of some performance issues and they work on other differences between the circular and square interfaces then this will probably end up being a pretty sweet package and I'm glad I got it and I'm glad I have it now so that I get to observe these changes so thank you for watching this has been the Moto 360 review if you want to leave a thumbs up below if you enjoyed that would be great and I'll talk to you guys in the very next one peace you